An Approach to Specify and Analyze Goal Model Families

Abstract

Abstract. Goal-oriented languages have been used for years to model and reason about functional, non-functional, and legal requirements. It is however difficult to develop and maintain these models, especially when many models overlap with each other. This becomes an even bigger challenge when a single, generic model is used to capture a family of related goal models but different evaluations are required for each individual family member. In this work, we use ITU-T's Goal-oriented Requirement Language (GRL) and the jUCMNav tool to illustrate the problem and to formulate a solution that exploits the flexibility of standard GRL. In addition, we report on our recent experience on the modeling of aerodrome regulations. We demonstrate the usefulness of specifying families of goal models to address challenges associated with the maintenance of models used in the regulatory domain. We finally define and illustrate a new tool-supported algorithm used to evaluate individual goal models that are members of the larger family model.

Handling Regulatory Goal Model Families as Software Product Lines

“…Tool support for importing regulations and handling large legal models is also available [4]. Finally, GRL is also the basis for the first definition of goal model families [5].…”

“…As separate models would hinder evolution, increase maintenance costs and the risk of errors, a form of generic model must be maintained. In [5], the authors take the hypothesis that a goal language, such as GRL, can be tailored sufficiently to support the concept of a model family. Applying it to a realistic aerodrome security regulations use case, they manage to annotate/tag goal model elements with the type of aerodrome to form a kind of generic model.…”

“…The main problem of this approach is that it only handles one set of tags, i.e. aerodrome types in [5], at a time. If several sets of tags have to be managed to describe the variability of a larger and more complex legal context, there is no way to ensure the consistency of either the constraints between these tags or the resulting goal model family.…”

“…Moreover, it is often the case that regulations are distinguished according to organization types (e.g., reflecting their location, their size, etc. ), or simply to different interpretations or analyses [5].…”

“…In [5], an approach is proposed to capture a generic goal model with ITU-T's Goal-oriented Requirement Language (GRL) [6,7] as a family, enabling one to extract individual members of the family (e.g., a goal model targeting a specific type of organization) for compliance analysis. However, this approach only supports one dimension of variability, e.g., the type of organization, at a time.…”