Operationalizing Human Values in the Requirements Engineering Process of Ethics-Aware Autonomous Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a requirements engineering approach that operationalizes human values as normative goals in ethics-aware autonomous systems, enabling conflict detection and negotiation, demonstrated via a medical sensor network case study.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to explicitly represent and operationalize human values as SLEEC requirements, supporting conflict analysis and negotiation in autonomous system design.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated through a medical Body Sensor Network case study.

Automated conflict detection and well-formedness checking implemented.

Aligns human values with functional and adaptation requirements.

Abstract

Operationalizing human values alongside functional and adaptation requirements remains challenging due to their ambiguous, pluralistic, and context-dependent nature. Explicit representations are needed to support the elicitation, analysis, and negotiation of value conflicts beyond traditional software engineering abstractions. In this work, we propose a requirements engineering approach for ethics-aware autonomous systems that captures human values as normative goals and aligns them with functional and adaptation goals. These goals are systematically operationalized into Social, Legal, Ethical, Empathetic, and Cultural (SLEEC) requirements, enabling automated well-formedness checking, conflict detection, and early design-time negotiation. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach through a medical Body Sensor Network case study.