Merging requirements from a set of ranked agents

Handling inconsistency is an increasingly important issue in data and knowledge engineering. A number of logic-based proposals have been made for handling aspects of inconsistency in beliefs (where we use beliefs as a general term to encompass representations of the real world) including belief revision theory, truth-maintenance, argumentation systems, and knowledgebase merging. In contrast, there are relatively few logic-based proposals for handling inconsistency in requirements (where we use requirements as a general term to encompass representations of a required world). Whilst there is a signiicant overlap between the issues of concern for handling inconsistency in beliefs and in requirements, there are also some signiicant diierences. In this paper, we present a logic-based framework for merging requirements from a set of ranked agents. In the following, we will present and motivate the framework, and then compare the framework with related logic-based proposals.