Formal Requirements Engineering: Tracing and Resolving Conflicts Using Nonmonotonic Representations

Nonmonotonic reasoning techniques based on the use of default rules have been proposed for requirements engineering. Previous works have discussed the benefits of nonmonotonic representations for dealing with conflicting requirements, for supporting the evolving nature of requirements, and for naturalness of representation. This paper addresses the problem of identifying and highlighting conflicts among requirements without the need to execute the representations operationally. This is an important advance since nonmonotonic reasoning in general, and default reasoning in particular, are known to be computationally complex. Getting an overview of the conflicts among requirements can be a valuable tool for requirements engineers. 1

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