Continuous Assessment Driven Requirements Elicitation For Trustworthy AI Systems

As AI systems increasingly impact critical decisions, ethical principles should be integrated throughout the entire development
lifecycle. This is particularly relevant when these technologies influence high-stakes decisions and critical infrastructure. Regulatory efforts emphasize the need to adopt an ethics-by-design approach, i.e., embedding ethics from the earliest stages of development. However, most assessment frameworks are intended for use after development is complete, which conflicts with this approach. Relying solely on ex-post evaluations risks overlooking ethical issues that should be addressed earlier. This highlights the need for assessment methods suitable for early and continuous evaluation throughout the system lifecycle. We propose an assessment approach that differentiates between ethical concerns and risks that are: (1) within the current scope, (2) relevant at later stages, and (3) not relevant. This differentiation enables stage-appropriate, effective application of ethics-by-design principles. We demonstrate this in a practical use case, where we adapt the EU Assessment List for Trustworthy Artificial
Intelligence (ALTAI) to elicit positive functional and non-functional requirements during the design phase of an AI-assisted decision-making system for railway management. We show how the method elicits a list of Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) sensitive requirements. We also provide suggestions to improve trustworthiness assessment tools suitable for early-stage evaluation.