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Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

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09-02-2016

Requirements specification via activity diagrams for agent-based systems

Authors: Yoosef Abushark, Tim Miller, John Thangarajah, Michael Winikoff, James Harland

Published in: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems | Issue 3/2017

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Abstract

Goal-oriented agent systems are increasingly popular for developing complex applications that operate in highly dynamic environments. As with any software these systems have to be designed starting with the specification of system requirements. In this paper, we extend a popular agent design methodology, Prometheus, and improve the understandability and maintainability of requirements by automatically generating UML activity diagrams from existing requirements models; namely scenarios and goal hierarchies. This approach aims to overcome some of the ambiguity present in the current requirements specification in Prometheus and provide more structure for representing variations. Even though our approach is grounded in Prometheus, it can be generalised to all the methodologies that support similar notions in specifying requirements (i.e. notions of goals and scenarios). We present our approach and an evaluation based on user experiments. The evaluation showed that the activity diagram based approach enhances people’s understanding of the requirements, makes it easier to modify requirements, and easier to check them against the detailed design of the agents for coverage.

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Events that represent inputs to the system from the environment.

That is, the goal-trees involving the scenario’s goal steps.

The description here is very brief, and we refer the reader to the literature for a full description [33].

The provided goal overview is a possible design and it does not necessarily represent a good one.

We refer the reader to [18] for a more comprehensive comparison between AOSE methodologies.

We include the option of having both the goal as well as its children because in the case where the design targets a BDI platform one typically posts the parent goal, which leads to the posting of the children (for an OR, one of the children) goal, so both parent and children are possible.

See http://www.graphviz.org/Documentation.php.

Refer to Appendix 1.

Refer to Appendix 2.

Participants were asked to rate their experience with UML behavioural models on a scale of 1–5, with 1 being inexperienced and 5 being expert.

Participants were asked to rate their familiarity with Prometheus on a scale of 1–5, with 1 being very unfamiliar and 5 being very familiar.

Refer to Appendix 3.

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Title: Requirements specification via activity diagrams for agent-based systems
Authors: Yoosef Abushark
Tim Miller
John Thangarajah
Michael Winikoff
James Harland
Publication date: 09-02-2016
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems / Issue 3/2017
Print ISSN: 1387-2532
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7454
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-016-9327-7

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