Automatic Derivation of Utility Functions for Monitoring Software Requirements

Utility functions can be used to monitor requirements of a dynamically adaptive system (DAS). More specifically, a utility function maps monitoring information to a scalar value proportional to how well a requirement is satisfied. Utility functions may be manually elicited by requirements engineers, or indirectly inferred through statistical regression techniques. This paper presents a goal-based requirements model-driven approach for automatically deriving state-, metric-, and fuzzy logic-based utility functions for RELAXed goal models. State- and fuzzy logic-based utility functions are responsible for detecting requirements violations, and metric-based utility functions are used to detect conditions conducive to a requirements violation. We demonstrate the proposed approach by applying it to the goal model of an intelligent vehicle system (IVS) and use the derived utility functions to monitor 7:he IVS under different environmental conditions at run time.