A Metamodeling Approach for Reasoning about Requirements

In requirements engineering, there are several approaches for requirements modeling such as goal-oriented, aspect-driven, and system requirements modeling. In practice, companies often customize a given approach to their specific needs. Thus, we seek a solution that allows customization in a systematic way. In this paper, we propose a metamodel for requirements models (called

core

metamodel

) and an approach for customizing this metamodel in order to support various requirements modeling approaches. The core metamodel represents the common concepts extracted from some prevalent approaches. We define the semantics of the concepts and the relations in the core metamodel. Based on this formalization, we can perform reasoning on requirements that may detect implicit relations and inconsistencies. Our approach for customization keeps the semantics of the core concepts intact and thus allows reuse of tools and reasoning over the customized metamodel. We illustrate the customization of our core metamodel with SysML concepts. As a case study, we apply the reasoning on requirements of an industrial mobile service application based on this customized core requirements metamodel.