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.
@article{arxiv.2602.09921,
title = {Operationalizing Human Values in the Requirements Engineering Process of Ethics-Aware Autonomous Systems},
author = {Everaldo Silva Júnior and Lina Marsso and Ricardo Caldas and Marsha Chechik and Genaína Nunes Rodrigues},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.09921},
year = {2026}
}