Formalizing prioritized consistency management in requirement engineering

Proposes a method of consistency management for a logical specification with priority. When we add or delete some information to/from the original specification, we sometimes encounter "inconsistency". We often try to fix such inconsistency by revising the specification minimally. Moreover, we sometimes know that a certain part of the specification should be changed in preference to the other parts, because the part is less important than the others or the part allows more exceptions than the others. In this paper, we formalize this activity by abduction. We introduce prioritized hypotheses expressing deleting and adding of some part of specification, and we translate a specification into an abductive logic program which is used to compute a prioritized, minimally revised specification. We then show an application of this formalization to module reconfiguration.