An analytic framework for specifying and analyzing imprecise requirements

There are at least three challenges with requirements analysis. First, it needs to bridge informal requirements, which are often vague and imprecise, to formal specification methods. Second, requirements often conflict with each other. Third, existing formal requirement specification methodologies are limited in supporting trade-off analysis between conflicting requirements and identifying the impact of a requirement change to the rest of the system. In this paper, an analytic framework is developed for the specification and analysis of imprecise requirements. In this framework, the elasticity of imprecise requirements is captured using fuzzy logic and the relationships between requirements are formally classified into four categories: conflicting, cooperative, mutually exclusive and irrelevant. This formal foundation facilitates the inference of relationships between requirements for detecting implicit conflicts, to assess the relative priorities of requirements for resolving conflicts, and to assess the effect of a requirement change.