A Framework for Multi-Valued Reasoning over Inconsistent Viewpoints

Abstract

During requirements elicitation, different stakeholders often hold different (and incompatible) views of how the proposed system should behave, resulting in inconsistencies between their descriptions. Consensus may not be needed for every detail, but it can be hard to determine whether a particular disagreement affects the critical properties of the system. Existing viewpoints-based frameworks support detection and resolution of inconsistencies, but do not support reasoning about the properties of inconsistent models. In this paper, we describe the XBel framework for merging and reasoning about multiple, inconsistent state machine models. XBel permits the analyst to choose how to combine information from the multiple viewpoints, where each viewpoint has an underlying multi-valued logic. The different values of our logics typically represent different levels of agreement. We have developed a multi-valued model checker, XChek, that allows us to check the merged model against temporal properties expressed in CTL. XChek determines a truth value for each property, effectively ascertaining the level of agreement for the property. The resulting framework can be used as an exploration tool to support requirements negotiation, by determining what properties are preserved for various combinations of inconsistent viewpoints.