Skip to main content

Extracting Requirements from Scenarios with ILP

  • Conference paper
Book cover Inductive Logic Programming (ILP 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4455))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Requirements Engineering involves the elicitation of high-level stakeholder goals and their refinement into operational system requirements. A key difficulty is that stakeholders typically convey their goals indirectly through intuitive narrative-style scenarios of desirable and undesirable system behaviour, whereas goal refinement methods usually require goals to be expressed declaratively using, for instance, a temporal logic. Currently, the extraction of formal requirements from scenario-based descriptions is a tedious and error-prone process that would benefit from automated tool support. We present an ILP methodology for inferring requirements from a set of scenarios and an initial but incomplete requirements specification. The approach is based on translating the specification and scenarios into an event-based logic programming formalism and using a non-monotonic ILP system to learn a set of missing event preconditions. The contribution of this paper is a novel application of ILP to requirements engineering that also demonstrate the need for non-monotonic learning.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Alrajeh, D., Russo, A., Uchitel, S.: Inferring operational requirements from goal models and scenarios using inductive systems. In: Proc. 5th Int. Workshop on Scenarios and State Machines (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Dardenne, A., Lamsweerde, A.v., Fickas, S.: Goal-directed requirements acquisition. Science of Computer Programming 20 (1), 3–50 (1993)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Eshghi, K., Kowalski, R.A.: Abduction compared with negation by failure. In: Levi, G., Martelli, M. (eds.) Proc. of the 6th Int. Conf. on Logic Programming, pp. 234–254 (1989)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Gelfond, M., Lifschitz, V.: The stable model semantics for logic programming. In: Kowalski, R.A., Bowen, K. (eds.) Proc. of the 5th Int. Conf. on Logic Programming, pp. 1070–1080. MIT Press, Cambridge (1988)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Giannakopoulou, D., Magee, J.: Fluent model checking for event-based systems. In: Proc. 11th ACM SIGSOFT Symp. on Foundations Software Engineering, ACM Press, New York (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Huth, M., Ryan, M.D.: Logic in Computer Science: Modelling and Reasoning about systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2000)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Kakas, A.C., Kowalski, R.A., Toni, F.: Abductive Logic Programming. Journal of Logic and Computation 2(6), 719–770 (1992)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  8. Kowalski, R.A., Sergot, M.: A logic-based calculus of events. New generation computing 4(1), 67–95 (1986)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Kramer, J., Magee, J., Sloman, M.: Conic: An integrated approach to distributed computer control systems. In: IEE Proc., Part E 130, pp. 1–10 (January 1983)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Lamsweerde, A.V.: Goal-oriented requirements engineering: A guided tour. In: Proc. 5th IEEE Int. Symp. on Requirements Engineering, pp. 249–263. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Lamsweerde, A.V., Willemet, L.: Inferring declarative requirements specifications from operational scenarios. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering 24(12), 1089–1114 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Letier, E., Kramer, J., Magee, J., Uchitel, S.: Deriving event-based transitions systems from goal-oriented requirements models. Technical Report 2006/2, Imperial College London (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Letier, E., Lamsweerde, A.V.: Deriving operational software specifications from system goals. In: Proc. 10th ACM SIGSOFT Symp. on Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 119–128. ACM Press, New York (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Lorenzo, D.: Learning non-monotonic Logic Programs to Reason about Actions and Change. PhD thesis, University of Coruna (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Magee, J., Kramer, J.: Concurrency: State Models and Java Programs. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester (1999)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Manna, Z., Pnueli, A.: The Temporal Logic of Reactive and Concurrent Systems. Springer, Heidelberg (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Miller, R., Shanahan, M.: Some alternative formulation of event calculus. Computer Science: Computational Logic: Logic programming and Beyond 2408 (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Moyle, S.: An investigation into Theory Completion Techniques in ILP. PhD thesis, University of Oxford (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Moyle, S., Muggleton, S.: Learning programs in the event calculus. In: Proc. 7th Int. Workshop on ILP (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Muggleton, S.H.: Inverse Entailment and Progol. New Generation Computing, Special issue on Inductive Logic Programming 13(3-4), 245–286 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Otero, R.: Embracing causality in inducing the effects of actions. In: Proc. 10th Conf. of the Spanish Assoc. for AI (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Otero, R., Gonzalez, J.: Iaction: a system for induction under non-horn programs with stable models. In: Proc. of the 16th Int. Conf. on ILP, volume submitted of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Otero, R., Varela, M.: Iaction: a system for learning action descriptions for planning. In: Proc. of the 16th Int. Conf. on ILP, volume submitted of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Ray, O.: Hybrid Abductive-Inductive Learning. PhD thesis, Imperial College London (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Ray, O.: Using abduction for induction of normal logic programs. In: Proc. of the ECAI 2006 Workshop on Abduction and Induction in AI and Scientific Modelling, pp. 28–31 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Ray, O., Kakas, A.: Prologica: a practical system for abductive logic programming. In: Dix, J., Hunter, A. (eds.) 11th International Workshop on Non-monotonic Reasoning. IFL Technical Report Series, pp. 304–312 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Russo, A., Miller, R., Nuseibeh, B., Kramer, J.: An abductive approach for analysing event-based requirements specifications. In: Stuckey, P.J. (ed.) ICLP 2002. LNCS, vol. 2401, pp. 22–37. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  28. Sakama, C.: Induction from answer sets in non-monotonic logic programs. ACM Trans. on Computational Logic 6(2), 203–231 (2005)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  29. Shanahan, M.P.: Solving the Frame Problem. MIT Press, Cambridge (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Sutcliffe, A., Maiden, N.A.M., Minocha, S., Manuel, D.: Supporting scenario-based requirements engineering. IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering 24, 1072–1088 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Stephen Muggleton Ramon Otero Alireza Tamaddoni-Nezhad

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Alrajeh, D., Ray, O., Russo, A., Uchitel, S. (2007). Extracting Requirements from Scenarios with ILP. In: Muggleton, S., Otero, R., Tamaddoni-Nezhad, A. (eds) Inductive Logic Programming. ILP 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4455. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73847-3_14

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73847-3_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-73846-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-73847-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics