Service-Based Specification of Reactive Systems

Requirement conflicts are very common. They can result from different stakeholders’ views, different knowledge of the operating environment, different interpretations of the same concept, etc. Requirement conflicts are harmless, as long as they are detected and resolved directly in the requirements engineering phase. Software development practice shows, however, that the conflicts often remain unperceived until implementation. In this case conflict resolution becomes much more expensive. In the presented paper we suggest an approach to formalization of functional requirements, based on the service concept introduced by Broy [5]. This allows us to model every functional requirement as a partial function and to identify conflicting functions. This results in a formally well-founded conflict detection method, applicable in the requirements engineering phase. Applicability of the method was tested on an industrial case study.