The Acquisition, Analysis and Evaluation of I for Knowledge-Based Systems

In this paper, a theoretical foundation has been laid and a practical method has been devel-oped for specifying, analyzing and evaluating the complex relationships between imprecise require-ments in knowledge-based systems. Imprecise re-quirements are represented by the canonical form in test-score semantics. The relationships be-tween requirements are classified to be conflict-ing and cooperative based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of relationships between re-quirements. This kind of analysis makes it pos-sible to formulate a feasible overall requirement from conflicting individual requirements. It also facilitates to find better trade-off strategies for conflicting requirements by using fuzzy multi-criteria optimization technique. A requirement engineering process has also been developed to incorporate imprecise requirements into the re-quirement analysis for knowledge-based systems. knowledge-based systems is that requirements often conflict with each other [Robinson 19901. However ex-isting specification methods consider that a require-ment specification, which contains conflicting require-ments, to be inconsistent, and should be avoided since requirements are specified as crisp ones [Roman 19851. Moreover, it is very difficult to analyze and specify a trade-off between conflicting requirements if these re-quirements are specified to be crisp [Robinson 19901.