Multiagent Systems is the title of a collection of papers dedicated to surveying specific themes of Multiagent Systems (MAS) and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI). All of them authored by leading researchers of this dynamic multidisciplinary field.

/pdf/multiagent-systems-a-modern-approach-to-distributed-5fon0donq1.pdf

Multiagent systems: a modern approach to distributed artificial intelligence

Context: During requirements engineering, prioritization is performed to grade or rank requirements in their order of importance and subsequent implementation releases It is a major step taken in making crucial decisions so as to increase the economic value of a system Objective: The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze existing prioritization techniques in the context of the formulated research questions Method: Search terms with relevant keywords were used to identify primary studies that relate requirements prioritization classified under journal articles, conference papers, workshops, symposiums, book chapters and IEEE bulletins Results: 73 Primary studies were selected from the search processes Out of these studies; 13 were journal articles, 35 were conference papers and 8 were workshop papers Furthermore, contributions from symposiums as well as IEEE bulletins were 2 each while the total number of book chapters amounted to 13 Conclusion: Prioritization has been significantly discussed in the requirements engineering domain However, it was generally discovered that, existing prioritization techniques suffer from a number of limitations which includes: lack of scalability, methods of dealing with rank updates during requirements evolution, coordination among stakeholders and requirements dependency issues Also, the applicability of existing techniques in complex and real setting has not been reported yet

A systematic literature review of software requirements prioritization research

Fundamentals of Statistics

Context: During requirements engineering, prioritization is performed to grade or rank requirements in their order of importance and subsequent implementation releases. It is a major step taken in making crucial decisions so as to increase the economic value of a system. Objective: The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze existing prioritization techniques in the context of the formulated research questions. Method: Search terms with relevant keywords were used to identify primary studies that relate requirements prioritization classified under journal articles, conference papers, workshops, symposiums, book chapters and IEEE bulletins. Results: 73 Primary studies were selected from the search processes. Out of these studies; 13 were journal articles, 35 were conference papers and 8 were workshop papers. Furthermore, contributions from symposiums as well as IEEE bulletins were 2 each while the total number of book chapters amounted

https://romisatriawahono.net/lecture/rm/survey/software%20engineering/Requirement%20Engineering/Achimugu%20-%20Software%20Requirements%20Prioritization%20-%202014.pdf

Information and Software Technology

Finding reliable partners to interact with in open environments is a challenging task for software agents, and trust and reputation mechanisms are used to handle this issue. From this viewpoint, we can observe the growing body of research on this subject, which indicates that these mechanisms can be considered key elements to design multiagent systems (MASs). Based on that, this article presents an extensive but not exhaustive review about the most significant trust and reputation models published over the past two decades, and hundreds of models were analyzed using two perspectives. The first one is a combination of trust dimensions and principles proposed by some relevant authors in the field, and the models are discussed using an MAS perspective. The second one is the discussion of these dimensions taking into account some types of interaction found in MASs, such as coalition, argumentation, negotiation, and recommendation. By these analyses, we aim to find significant relations between trust dimensions and types of interaction so it would be possible to construct MASs using the most relevant dimensions according to the types of interaction, which may help developers in the design of MASs.

Trust and Reputation Models for Multiagent Systems

The chaos all through the development of requirements evolves due to disparity between users and developers resulting in project devastations and terminations. Business and product requirements often change as development proceeds, making a straight-line path to requirements engineering impracticable. Considering the adaptable nature of requirements and multi-dimensional concerns of stakeholders, spiral model based proposed framework bridges the gap between users and developers by extending an agent oriented approach to requirements engineering. Requirements encapsulated in the form of User Story Cards signify user oriented view of requirements, whilst Agent Cards facilitate developers in observing the requirements of a system in terms of software agents. Negotiation process obtains an integrated view of all stakeholders over conflicting requirements that leads to ascertain correct, prioritized and comprehensive list of requirements.

An agent-oriented approach to requirements engineering

The success of a system depends upon how intensively it accomplishes its intended purpose by meeting all stakeholders' concerns pertaining to conflicting requirements such as cost, schedule, performance etc. Various stakeholders may have their individual and consolidated concerns over conflicting requirements. Individual concerns facilitate a stakeholder to obtain preference orderings of conflicting requirements and consolidated concerns assist developer to obtain consensual preference ordering that would satisfy all stakeholders. As the concerns over the conflicting requirements are vague, uncertain and subjective in nature, this paper employs Fuzzy Decision Making for modeling the vagueness, haziness and non-specificity associated with the requirements. Finally a case study using an agent oriented system is presented to illustrate the application of the methodology. associated with the requirements. Secondly, these methods don't take into account the goals and constraints associated with the conflicting requirements that may lead to stakeholders' dissatisfaction. This paper employs individual fuzzy decision making to capture the subjectivity encapsulated in individual concerns of stakeholders with respect to goals and constraints of conflicting requirements and hence facilitates them to obtain preference orderings of conflicting requirements that reflects their individual concerns. Secondly this paper utilizes multi-person decision making to resolve diverse concerns of various stakeholders. These integrated set of requirements would satisfy all stakeholders and also assist the developer to ascertain the essential requirements of stakeholders within limited resources. The application of the methodology is illustrated using Agent oriented Paradigm (AOP) that is a recent way of representing the requirements of a system in terms of agents. An Agent-oriented System (AoS) typically involves a large number of agents playing different roles, interacting with each other to achieve individual and common goals (11). Software agents are computer programs that act autonomously on behalf of their users across open and distributed environments to solve growing number of complex problems. In an agent-oriented system, various stakeholders may differ over the implementation issues of agents. In addition, they may have their own individual and consolidated concerns associated with goals and constraints associated with conflicting requirements e.g. cost of accomplishing a system may be a conflicting requirement for various stakeholders. They may have their own priorities over cost in terms of goals and constraints associated with it. Goal associated with the cost may be to enhance the return of an organization but not at the stake of quality of service. This paper takes into account goals and constraints associated with the conflicting requirements and obtain an integrated set of requirements using Fuzzy Decision-Making that would satisfy all the stakeholders. The organization of the paper is as follows: Section II introduces Fuzzy Decision-Making. Section III utilizes Fuzzy Decision-Making to deal with individual and consolidated concerns of stakeholders to prioritize requirements. Section IV illustrates the proposed methodology using an agent oriented system.

/pdf/an-integrated-approach-to-prioritize-requirements-using-4gv8wsfzv9.pdf

An Integrated Approach to Prioritize Requirements using Fuzzy Decision Making

Agent-oriented software development is a recent paradigm of analyzing, designing and developing software systems that aims to develop a system as a collection of autonomous interacting agents. Agent-oriented requirement engineering models requirements of a system in terms of goals and tasks that various software agents would achieve to accomplish the goals of that system. In an agent based project, various stakeholders may have different concerns and priorities over implementation of various agents due to time and budget constraints. Also, the requirements of stakeholders are often subjective and are accompanied with vagueness and uncertainty. This paper therefore utilizes fuzzy decision model named as Multi-Person Decision-Making Model to negotiate and integrate the requirements of various stakeholders. This integrated set of requirements facilitates the developers in prioritizing and deciding which agents are viable to achieve in the limited constraints.

An Application of Multi-Person Decision-Making Model for Negotiating and Prioritizing Requirements in Agent-Oriented Paradigm

Inter-agent communication is one of the main concerns of agent oriented requirements engineering that is delineated as managing inter-dependencies and interaction among various agents performing collaborative activities. To carry out cooperative activities, tasks are disseminated and delegated to other agents with a rationale of sharing mutual expertise and potential. So an agent may be dependent on other agent for accomplishing a goal or for want of a resource to achieve that goal. This requires an agent to quantify the dependency needs termed as Degree of Dependency (DoD) to realize whether it should delegate the task to another agent, if yes, then to whom so that overall quality of Multi-Agent System (MAS) is not compromised. To evaluate DoD, this work employs domain knowledge that is an inclusive knowledge of an environment containing the business rules, credentials and reports to understand the business needs precisely. As the domain knowledge may be fuzzy and uncertain, Fuzzy Inference system is utilized to evaluate DoD from domain knowledge. This will assist the developer to address inter-agent coordination issues without squandering resources and hence in building MAS of high quality.

Evaluating Degree of Dependency from Domain Knowledge Using Fuzzy Inference System

Agent mediated e-commerce involves buying and selling on Internet through software agents. The success of an agent mediated e-commerce system lies in the underlying reputation management system which is used to improve the quality of services in e-market environment. A reputation system encourages the honest behaviour of seller agents and discourages the malicious behaviour of dishonest seller agents in the e-market where actual traders never meet each other. This paper evaluates various reputation systems for assigning reputation rating to software agents acting on behalf of buyers and sellers in e-market. These models are analysed on the basis of a number of features viz. reputation computation and their defence mechanisms against different attacks. To address the problems of traditional reputation systems which are relatively static in nature, this paper identifies characteristics of a dynamic reputation framework which ensures judicious use of information sharing for inter-agent cooperation and also associates the reputation of an agent with the value of a transaction so that the market approaches an equilibrium state and dishonest agents are weeded out of the market.

Vibha Gaur

Papers

An agent-oriented approach to requirements engineering

An Integrated Approach to Prioritize Requirements using Fuzzy Decision Making

An Application of Multi-Person Decision-Making Model for Negotiating and Prioritizing Requirements in Agent-Oriented Paradigm

Evaluating Degree of Dependency from Domain Knowledge Using Fuzzy Inference System

Evaluating Reputation Systems for Agent Mediated e-Commerce