Inconsistency handling in multi-perspective specifications

Abstract

The development of most large and complex systems necessarily involves many people+ach with their own perspectives on the system defined by their knowledge, responsibilities, and commitments. To address this we have advocated distributed development of specifications from multiple perspectives. However, this leads to problems of identifying and handling inconsistencies between such perspectives. Maintaining absolute consistency is not always possible. Often this is not even desirable since this can unnecessarily constrain the development process, and can lead to the loss of important information. Indeed since the real-world forces us to work with inconsistencies, we should formalize some of the usually informal or extra-logical ways of responding to them. This is not necessarily done by eradicating inconsistencies but rather by supplying logical rules specifying how we should act on them. To achieve this, we combine two lines of existing research: the Viewpoints framework for perspective development, interaction and organization, and a logic-based approach to inconsistency handling. This paper presents our technique for inconsistency handling in the Viewpoints framework hy using simple examples.

Viewpoint Co-evolution through Coarse-Grained Changes and Coupled Transformations

“…A large number of approaches address the problem of multi-viewpoint integration and synchronization [7]. We have works on synchronizing artifacts in software engineering, mostly influenced by original works on multi-view consistency [11,13] using a generic representation of modifications and relying on users to write code to handle each type of modification in each type of view. This idea influenced later efforts on model synchronization frameworks in general [19,20] and in particular bi-directional model transformations [33,37].…”

MaDe4IC: an abstract method for managing model dependencies in inter-organizational cooperations

“…The Viewpoints framework, suggested by Finkelstein et al [20], and its extensions by Easterbrook et al [15] and Finkelstein et al [21] allow inconsistencies when developing different viewpoints in order not to kill creativity. Their method is logic-based and allows checking intra-model and inter-model consistency.…”

Reasoning About Requirements Evolution Using Clustered Belief Revision

“…For example, one can derive any proposition B from propositions A and ¬A. This is known as theory trivialisation, and is clearly undesirable in the context of requirements engineering, where inconsistency often arises [5,8].…”