Title: A novel approach to streamline RE process for multi-agent systems

Authors: Anuja Soni; Vibha Gaur

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of Delhi, Delhi, India ' Department of Computer Science, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

Abstract: The intensification of ubiquitous computing has revitalised distributed multi-agent systems. Business and product requirements often change as development proceeds, making a straight-line path to requirement engineering (RE) impracticable. To cope up with the adaptability in the requirements, this work offers a novel evolutionary approach to revolutionise RE process for MAS. The proposed framework bridges the gap between users and developers by facilitating user-oriented view using user story cards and developer-oriented view using agent cards. To address inter-agent coordination issues, this work presents bilateral concepts-type of dependency and degree of dependency that assist the developers in reducing the trivial dependencies and thereby unnecessary communication overheads. An integrated approach for requirements prioritisation enables a large number of stakeholders to resolve their conflicts in deciding which agents are viable to achieve. In addition, a fuzzy traceability vector model and a coding scheme to specify the requirements of agents are the distinguished features of this work.

Keywords: agent cards; fuzzy decision making; fuzzy traceability vector model; FTVM; coding scheme; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; requirements engineering; user story card; USC; user-oriented view; dependencies.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSETA.2015.075618

International Journal of Software Engineering, Technology and Applications, 2015 Vol.1 No.2/3/4, pp.190 - 221

Received: 06 Sep 2014
Accepted: 05 May 2015
Published online: 30 Mar 2016 *

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