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The requirements specifications of complex systems are increasingly developed in a distributed fashion. It makes inconsistency management necessary during the requirements stage. However, identifying appropriate inconsistency handling proposals is still an important challenge. In particular, for inconsistencies involving many different stakeholders with different concerns, it is difficult to reach an agreement on inconsistency handling. To address this, this paper presents a vote-based approach to choosing acceptable common proposals for handling inconsistency. This approach focuses on the inconsistency in requirements that results from conflicting intentions of stakeholders. Informally speaking, we consider each distinct stakeholder (or a distributed artifact) involved in the inconsistency as a voter. Then we transform identification of an acceptable common proposal into a problem of combinatorial vote. Based on each stakeholder's preferences on the set of proposals, an acceptable common proposal is identified in an automated way according to a given social vote rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems to be inevitable to confront vague information about customer's needs during the software requirements stage. It may be desirable to record and clarify the vague information to avoid missing real requirements. In this paper, we provide an inconsistency-based strategy to handle vague information in the framework of Annotated Predicate Calculus. This strategy permits the stakeholder to describe the different vague information using statements with different levels of belief, where each level of belief is determined by the degree of vagueness. By checking consistency of the union of vague requirements and clear requirements, we then heighten the level of belief in uncontroversial vague requirements. We also lower the levels of belief in requirements involved in undesirable inferences and leave them to be articulated in some following stage. To support this, Annotated Predicate Calculus is used to represent the requirements specification. In particular, we present a special belief semilattice, which defines truth values appropriate for representing the strength of analyst's belief in the truth of requirements statements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of requirements engineering, measuring inconsistency is crucial to effective inconsistency management. A practical measure must consider both the degree and significance of inconsistency in specification. The main contribution of this paper is providing an approach for measuring inconsistent specification in terms of the priority-based scoring vector, which integrates the measure of the degree of inconsistency with the measure of the significance of inconsistency. In detail, for each specification Δ that consists of a set of requirements statements, if L is a m-level priority set, we define a m-dimensional priority-based significance vector to measure the significance of the inconsistency in Δ. Furthermore, a priority-based scoring vector : (Δ)→ Nm+1 has been defined to provide an ordering relation over specifications that describes which specification is "more essentially inconsistent than" others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]