Verification of Use Case with Petri Nets in Requirement Analysis

Requirement analysis plays a very important role in reliability, cost, and safety of a software system. The use case approach remains the dominant approach during requirement elicitation in industry. Unfortunately, the use case approach suffers from several shortcomings, such as lacking accuracy and being difficult to analyze and validate the dynamic behavior of use cases for concurrency, consistency, etc. This paper proposes an approach for overcoming limitations of the use case approach and applies the approach in Model Driven Development (MDD). Timed and Controlled Petri Nets are used as the formal description and verification mechanism for the acquired requirements. Use cases are used to elicit the requirements and to construct scenarios. After specifying the scenarios, each of them can be transformed into its correspondent Petri-net model. Through analyzing these Petri-net models, some flaws or errors of requirements can be detected. The proposed approach is demonstrated by an E-mail client system.