A Fuzzy Decision Support Approach for Model-Based Tradeoff Analysis of Non-functional Requirements

One of the main challenges in addressing Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) in designing systems is to take into account their interdependencies and mutual impacts. For this reason, they cannot be considered in isolation and a careful balance and tradeoff among them should be established. This makes it a difficult task to select design decisions and features that lead to the satisfaction of all different NFRs in the system, which becomes even more difficult when the complexity of a system grows. In this paper, we introduce an approach based on fuzzy logic and decision support systems that helps to identify different design alternatives that lead to higher overall satisfaction of NFRs in the system. This is achieved by constructing a model of the NFRs and then performing analysis on the model. To build the model, we use a modified version of the NFR UML profile which we have introduced in our previous works, and using model transformation techniques we automate the analysis of the model.