Resolving goal conflicts via argumentation-based analysis of competing hypotheses

A stakeholder's beliefs influence his or her goals. However, a stakeholder's beliefs may not be consistent with the goals of all stakeholders of a system being constructed. Such belief-goal inconsistencies could manifest themselves as conflicting goals of the system to be. We propose Arg-ACH, a novel approach for capturing inconsistencies between stakeholders' goals and beliefs, and resolving goal conflicts. Arg-ACH employs a hybrid of (1) the analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH), a structured analytic technique, for systematically eliciting stakeholders' goals and beliefs, and (2) rational argumentation for determining belief-goal inconsistencies to resolve conflicts. Arg-ACH treats conflicting goals as hypotheses that compete with each other and the winning hypothesis as a goal of the system to be. Arg-ACH systematically captures the trail of a requirements engineer's thought process in resolving conflicts. We evaluated Arg-ACH via a study in which 20 subjects applied Arg-ACH or ACH to resolve goal conflicts in a sociotechnical system concerning national security. We found that Arg-ACH is superior to ACH with respect to completeness and coverage of belief search; length of belief chaining; ease of use; explicitness of the assumptions made; and repeatability of conclusions across subjects. Not surprisingly, Arg-ACH required more time than ACH: although this is justified by improvements in quality, the gap could be reduced through better tooling.