Temporal Logics Meet Real-World Software Requirements: A Reality Check

Reasoning on the behavior of software systems is challenging, especially in critical domains such as aerospace. Transitioning from natural language to formal specifications enables long-pursued activities such as modeling, synthesis, and verification. Temporal logics are often used in this regard, each with different operators, expressiveness or associated implemen- tations. However, a significant gap exists between the theoretical capabilities of the logics applied in formal methods and the practical needs for specifying real-world requirements. This paper addresses this gap through a case study of SpaceWire, a standard specification for a data-handling communication protocol often adopted on spacecraft and other on-board sys- tems. We extract 89 software requirements exhibiting temporal behavior and transcribe them into logic-based formalizations using different established temporal logics, maximizing natural encoding. We analyze the suitability of the chosen logics for formalizing the selected software requirements to reason about potential implications for both researchers and practitioners. Index Terms—requirements, specification, temporal logics