Identifying Acceptable Common Proposals for Handling Inconsistent Software Requirements

The requirements specifications of complex systems are increasingly developed in a distributed fashion. It makes inconsistency management necessary during the requirements stage. However, identifying appropriate inconsistency handling proposals is still an important challenge. In particular, for inconsistencies involving many different stakeholders with different concerns, it is difficult to reach an agreement on inconsistency handling. To address this, this paper presents a votebased approach to choosing acceptable common proposals for handling inconsistency. This approach focuses on the inconsistency in requirements that results from conflicting intentions of stakeholders. Informally speaking, we consider each distinct stakeholder (or a distributed artifact) involved in the inconsistency as a voter. Then we transform identification of an acceptable common proposal into a problem of combinatorial vote. Based on each stakeholder’s preferences on the set of proposals, an acceptable common proposal is identified in an automated way according to a given social vote rule.