Viewpoints merging via incrementally elicited ranked structures

Handling inconsistent requirements specifications remains a difficult challenge for the requirements engineering community. This paper seeks to apply techniques developed in the belief merging literature within AI to this problem. The application is non-trivial, since many belief merging operations cannot be directly applied, but must be modified to make them usable in practical settings. We address the problem of merging state model viewpoints, and improve on previous work by Chechik and Easterbrook. We develop a variant of the belief merging framework developed by Meyer et al, which we refer to as the framework of incrementally elicited ranked structures. We show that viewpoint merging within this framework is relatively easy and provides meaningful results.