Systematic tradeoff analysis for conflicting imprecise requirements

The need to deal with conflicting system requirements has become increasingly important over the past several years. Often, these requirements are elastic in that they can be satisfied to a degree. The overall goal of this research is to develop a formal framework that facilitates the identification and the tradeoff analysis of conflicting requirements by explicitly capturing their elasticity. Based on a fuzzy set theoretic foundation for representing imprecise requirements, we describe a systematic approach for analyzing the tradeoffs between conflicting requirements using the techniques in decision science. The systematic tradeoff analyses are used for three important tasks in the requirement engineering process: (1) for validating the structure used in aggregating prioritized requirements, (2) for identifying the structures and the parameters of the underlying representation of imprecise requirements, and (3) for assessing the priorities of conflicting requirements. We illustrate these techniques using the requirements of a conference room scheduling system.