Formal Reasoning Techniques for Goal Models

Over the past decade, goal models have been used in Computer Science in order to represent software requirements, business objectives and design qualities. Such models extend traditional AI planning techniques for representing goals by allowing for partially defined and possibly inconsistent goals. This paper presents a formal framework for reasoning with such goal models. In particular, the paper proposes a qualitative and a numerical axiomatization for goal modeling primitives and introduces label propagation algorithms that are shown to be sound and complete with respect to their respective axiomatizations. In addition, the paper reports on experimental results on the propagation algorithms applied to a goal model for a US car manufacturer. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.