“Fairness Analysis” in Requirements Assignments

Abstract

Requirements engineering for multiple customers, each of whom have competing and often conflicting priorities, raises issues of negotiation, mediation and conflict resolution. This paper uses a multi-objective optimisation approach to support investigation of the trade-offs in various notions of fairness between multiple customers. Results are presented to validate the approach using two real-world data sets and also using data sets created specifically to stress test the approach. Simple graphical techniques are used to visualize the solution space.