Answer-Set Programming in Requirements Engineering

[Context and motivation] Requirements form the foundation of software systems. The quality of the requirements influences the quality of the developed software. [Question/problem] One of the main requirement issues is inconsistency, particularly onerous when the requirements concern temporal constraints. Manual checking whether temporal requirements are consistent is tedious and error prone and may be prohibitively expensive when the number of requirements is large. [Principal ideas/results] We show that answer-set programming tools ASP can be successfully applied to detect inconsistencies in software and system requirements. Our assumption is that these requirements are given in a formal requirement specification language called Temporal Action Language TeAL. [Contribution] We present a translation from TeAL to the ASP language format accepted by clingcon. We show that clingcon can analyze requirements for several real software systems, verifying their consistency or identifying inconsistencies. We also examine the performance of the clingcon translation.