Goal-conflict detection based on temporal satisfiability checking

Goal-oriented requirements engineering approaches propose capturing how a system should behave through the specification of high-level goals, from which requirements can then be systematically derived. Goals may however admit subtle situations that make them diverge, i.e., not be satisfiable as a whole under specific circumstances feasible within the domain, called boundary conditions. While previous work allows one to identify boundary conditions for conflicting goals written in LTL, it does so through a pattern-based approach, that supports a limited set of patterns, and only produces pre-determined formulations of boundary conditions. We present a novel automated approach to compute boundary conditions for general classes of conflicting goals expressed in LTL, using a tableaux-based LTL satisfiability procedure. A tableau for an LTL formula is a finite representation of all its satisfying models, which we process to produce boundary conditions that violate the formula, indicating divergence situations. We show that our technique can automatically produce boundary conditions that are more general than those obtainable through existing previous pattern-based approaches, and can also generate boundary conditions for goals that are not captured by these patterns.