Requirements Engineering Challenges in Building AI-Based Complex Systems

Abstract: This paper identifies and tackles the challenges of the requirements engineering discipline when applied to development of AI-based complex systems. Due to their complex behaviour, there is an immanent need for a tailored development process for such systems. However, there is still no widely used and specifically tailored process in place to effectively and efficiently deal with requirements suitable for specifying a software solution that uses machine learning. By analysing the related work from software engineering and artificial intelligence fields, potential contributions have been recognized from agent-based software engineering and goal-oriented requirements engineering research, as well as examples from large product development companies. The challenges have been discussed, with proposals given how and when to tackle them. RE4AI taxonomy has also been outlined, to inform the tailoring of development process.