Requirements engineering (RE) is concerned with the identification of the goals to be achieved by the envisioned system, the operationalization of such goals into services and constraints, and the assignment of responsibilities for the resulting requirements to agents such as humans, devices, and software. The processes involved in RE include: domain analysis, elicitation, specification, assessment, negotiation, documentation, and evolution. Getting high quality requirements is difficult and critical. Recent surveys have confirmed the growing recognition of RE as an area of utmost importance in software engineering research and practice. The paper presents a brief history of the main concepts and techniques developed to date to support the RE task, with a special focus on modeling as a common denominator to all RE processes. The initial description of a complex safety-critical system is used to illustrate a number of current research trends in RE-specific areas such as goal oriented requirements elaboration, conflict management, and the handling of abnormal agent behaviors. Opportunities for goal based architecture derivation are also discussed together with research directions to let the field move towards more disciplined habits.

/pdf/requirements-engineering-in-the-year-00-a-research-1q7dk16vjv.pdf

Requirements engineering in the year 00: a research perspective

Research in requirements engineering has produced an extensive body of knowledge, but there are four areas in which the foundation of the discipline seems weak or obscure. This article shines some light in the “four dark corners,” exposing problems and proposing solutions. We show that all descriptions involved in requirements engineering should be descriptions of the environment. We show that certain control information is necessary for sound requirements engineering, and we explain the close association between domain knowledge and refinement of requirements. Together these conclusions explain the precise nature of requirements, specifications, and domain knowledge, as well as the precise nature of the relationships among them. They establish minimum standards for what information should be represented in a requirements language. They also make it possible to determine exactly what it means for requirements and engineering to be successfully completed.

/pdf/four-dark-corners-of-requirements-engineering-3tofy7azs9.pdf

Four dark corners of requirements engineering

The construction of large-scale embedded software systems demands the use of design methodologies and modelling techniques that support abstraction, inheritance, modularity, and other mechanisms for reducing complexity and preventing error. If multi-agent systems are to become widely accepted as a basis for large-scale applications, adequate agent-oriented methodologies and modelling techniques will be essential. This is not just to ensure that systems are reliable, maintainable, and conformant, but to allow their design, implementation, and maintenance to be carried out by software analysts and engineers rather than researchers. In this paper we describe an agent-oriented methodology and modelling technique for systems of agents based upon the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) paradigm. Our models extend existing Object-Oriented (OO) models. By building upon and adapting existing, well-understood techniques, we take advantage of their maturity to produce an approach that can be easily learnt and understood by those familiar with the OO paradigm.

A methodology and modelling technique for systems of BDI agents

Formal specifications have been a focus of software engineering research for many years and have been applied in a wide variety of settings. Their industrial use is still limited but has been steadily growing. After recalling the essence,role, usage, and pitfalls of formal specification, the paper reviews the main specification paradigms to date and discuss their evaluation criteria. It then provides a brief assessment of the current strengths and weaknesses of today’s formal specification technology. This provides a basis for formulating a number of requirements for formal specification to become a core software engineering activity in the future.

/pdf/formal-specification-a-roadmap-r6n0pelv22.pdf

Formal specification: a roadmap

Recently a number of requirements engineering languages and methods have flourished that not only address 'what' questions but also 'why', 'who' and 'when' questions. The objective of the paper is twofold: to assess the strengths and weaknesses of one of these methodologies on a nontrivial benchmark; and to illustrate and discuss a number of challenging issues that need to be addressed for such methodologies to become effective in supporting real, complex requirements engineering tasks. The problem considered here is that of a distributed meeting scheduler system; the methodology considered is the KAOS goal directed language and method. The issues raised from this case study include goal identification, the "deidelization" of unachievable goals, the handling of interfering goals, the impact of early formal reasoning, the merits of early reuse of abstract descriptions and categories, requirements traceability and the need to link requirements to retractable assumptions, and the potential benefits of hybrid acquisition strategies.

/pdf/goal-directed-elaboration-of-requirements-for-a-meeting-37gvvpaqfs.pdf

Goal-directed elaboration of requirements for a meeting scheduler: problems and lessons learnt

In this paper, we present a formal object-oriented specification language designed for capturing requirements expressed on composite realtime systems. The specification describes the system as a society of 'agents', each of them being characterised (i) by its responsibility with respect to actions happening in the system and (ii) by its time-varying perception of the behaviour of the other agents. On top of the language, we also suggest some methodological guidance by considering a general strategy based on a progressive assignement cf responsibilities to agents.

O-O Requirements Analysis: an Agent Perspective

The paper provides a summary of the discussions held in a working group during ICEIMT Workshop 4 (Enterprise Integration Principles and Fundamentals). The topic of the working group was “Formal Semantics of Enterprise Models”. In the paper, we suggest that enterprise integration is currently hindered by shortcomings of enterprise modelling languages (section 1), that a better language should be defined and that its semantics should be defined in terms of a formal theory (section 2). The paper concludes with two proposals for research and standardisation projects (section 3).

Formal Semantics of Enterprise Models

We propose a framework combining several formalisms for the Requirements Engineering (RE) of discrete manufacturing systems. Each formalism relies upon a set of concepts that together form an ontology.

Defining an Ontology for the Formal Requirements Engineering of Manufacturing Systems

Requirements Engineering is more and more considered as a central phase in the development and implementation of computer systems. Within the context of CIM, the CIMOSA project proposes a set of models based on adequate concepts for expressing requirements. In this paper, we suggest how these models can be supported by the use of a fully formal requirements specification language called ALBERT and based on an agent-oriented real-time temporal logic framework.

/pdf/using-a-formal-declarative-language-for-specifying-48tl6kjczl.pdf

Michaël Petit

Papers

O-O Requirements Analysis: an Agent Perspective

Formal Semantics of Enterprise Models

Defining an Ontology for the Formal Requirements Engineering of Manufacturing Systems

Using a Formal Declarative Language for Specifying Requirements Modelled in CIMOSA

Towards a Formal Agent-Oriented Requirements Definition of Manufacturing Systems