Answer-Set Programming in Requirements Engineering

Wenbin Li, David Brown, Jane Huffman Hayes, Miroslaw Truszczynski

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

[Context and motivation] Requirements form the foundation of software systems. The quality of the requirements influences the quality of the developed software. [Question/problem] One of the main requirement issues is inconsistency, particularly onerous when the requirements concern temporal constraints. Manual checking whether temporal requirements are consistent is tedious and error prone and may be prohibitively expensive when the number of requirements is large. [Principal ideas/results] We show that answer-set programming tools (ASP) can be successfully applied to detect inconsistencies in software and system requirements. Our assumption is that these requirements are given in a formal requirement specification language called Temporal Action Language (TeAL). [Contribution] We present a translation from TeAL to the ASP language format accepted by clingcon. We show that clingcon can analyze requirements for several real software systems, verifying their consistency or identifying inconsistencies. We also examine the performance of the clingcon translation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationRequirements Engineering
Subtitle of host publicationFoundation for Software Quality - 20th International Working Conference, REFSQ 2014, Proceedings
Pages168-183
Number of pages16
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event20th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, REFSQ 2014 - Essen, Germany
Duration: Apr 7 2014Apr 10 2014

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8396 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference20th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, REFSQ 2014
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityEssen
Period4/7/144/10/14

Keywords

  • knowledge representation
  • requirement engineering
  • temporal requirements

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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