Inconsistency measurement of software requirements specifications: an ontology-based approach

Management of requirements inconsistency is key to the development of complex trustworthy software system, and precise measurement is precondition for the management of requirements inconsistency properly. But at present, although there are a lot of work on the detection of requirements inconsistency, most of them are limited in treating requirements inconsistency according to heuristic rules, we still lacks of promising method for handling requirements inconsistency properly. Based on an abstract requirements refinement process model, this paper takes domain ontology as infrastructure for the refinement of software requirements, the aim of which is to get requirements descriptions that are comparable. Thus we can measure requirements inconsistency based on tangent plane of requirements refinement tree, after we have detected inconsistent relations of leaf nodes at semantic level.