Requirements engineering for artificial intelligence systems: A systematic mapping study

Abstract

In traditional software systems, Requirements Engineering (RE) activities are well-established and researched. However, building Artificial Intelligence (AI) based software with limited or no insight into the system’s inner workings poses significant new challenges to RE. Existing literature has focused on using AI to manage RE activities, with limited research on RE for AI (RE4AI). This paper investigates current approaches for specifying requirements for AI systems, identifies available frameworks, methodologies, tools, and techniques used to model requirements, and finds existing challenges and limitations. We performed a systematic mapping study to find papers on current RE4AI approaches. We identified 43 primary studies and analyzed the existing methodologies, models, tools, and techniques used to specify and model requirements in real-world scenarios. We found several challenges and limitations of existing RE4AI practices. The findings highlighted that current RE applications were not adequately adaptable for building AI systems and emphasized the need to provide new techniques and tools to support RE4AI. Our results showed that most of the empirical studies on RE4AI focused on autonomous, self-driving vehicles and managing data requirements, and areas such as ethics, trust, and explainability need further research.