Affiliations: School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University,
Beijing 100871, P.R.China. mukedian@math.pku.edu.cn | School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, Queen's University, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK.
w.liu@qub.ac.uk | School of Electronics Engineering and Comp. Sci.,
Peking University, Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies,
Ministry of Education, Beijing 100871, P.R.China. zhijin@sei.pku.edu.cn | Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, P.R.China. rqlu@math.ac.cn | School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, Queen's University, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK.
a.yue@qub.ac.uk | School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, Queen's University, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK.
da.bell@qub.ac.uk
Note: [] Address for correspondence: Kedian Mu, School of Mathematical
Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China
Abstract: Developing a desirable framework for handling inconsistencies in
software requirements specifications is a challenging problem. It has been
widely recognized that the relative priority of requirements can help
developers to make some necessary trade-off decisions for resolving con-
flicts. However, for most distributed development such as viewpoints-based
approaches, different stakeholders may assign different levels of priority to
the same shared requirements statement from their own perspectives. The
disagreement in the local levels of priority assigned to the same shared
requirements statement often puts developers into a dilemma during the
inconsistency handling process. The main contribution of this paper is to
present a prioritized merging-based framework for handling inconsistency in
distributed software requirements specifications. Given a set of distributed
inconsistent requirements collections with the local prioritization, we first
construct a requirements specification with a prioritization from an overall
perspective. We provide two approaches to constructing a requirements
specification with the global prioritization, including a merging-based
construction and a priority vector-based construction. Following this, we
derive proposals for handling inconsistencies from the globally prioritized
requirements specification in terms of prioritized merging. Moreover, from the
overall perspective, these proposals may be viewed as the most appropriate to
modifying the given inconsistent requirements specification in the sense of the
ordering relation over all the consistent subsets of the requirements
specification. Finally, we consider applying negotiation-based techniques to
viewpoints so as to identify an acceptable common proposal from these
proposals.
Keywords: Inconsistency, Requirements Engineering, Prioritized Merging, Local Prioritization
