Requirements Problem and Solution Concepts for Adaptive Systems Engineering, and their Relationship to Mathematical Optimisation, Decision Analysis, and Expected Utility Theory
This work addresses foundational issues in requirements engineering for adaptive systems, which is incremental as it builds on existing concepts.
The paper tackles the requirements problem for adaptive systems, showing it differs from the default requirements problem and providing a formal definition, with implications for future research.
Requirements Engineering (RE) focuses on eliciting, modelling, and analyzing the requirements and environment of a system-to-be in order to design its specification. The design of the specification, usually called the Requirements Problem (RP), is a complex problem solving task, as it involves, for each new system-to-be, the discovery and exploration of, and decision making in, new and ill-defined problem and solution spaces. The default RP in RE is to design a specification of the system-to-be which (i) is consistent with given requirements and conditions of its environment, and (ii) together with environment conditions satisfies requirements. This paper (i) shows that the Requirements Problem for Adaptive Systems (RPAS) is different from, and is not a subclass of the default RP, (ii) gives a formal definition of RPAS, and (iii) discusses implications for future research.