Refining Goal Models by Evaluating System Behaviour

Nowadays, information systems have to perform in complex, heterogeneousenvironments, considering a variety of system users with different needsand preferences. Software engineering methodologies need to cope with the complexityof requirements specification in such scenarios, where new requirementsmay emerge also at run-time and the system's goals are expected to evolve tomeet new stakeholder needs. Following an agent-oriented approach, we are studying methods and techniquesto design adaptive and evolvable information systems able to fulfill stakeholders'objectives. In a previous work we defined an Agent-Oriented framework to design andcode system specifications in terms of goal models and we instantiated it in atool supported process which exploits the Agent-Oriented Software Engineeringmethodology Tropos and the Multi-Agent Platform JADE/Jadex [11]. In this paper, we show how to use this framework to develop a system followingan iterative process, where the system execution allows enriching the systemspecification given in terms of goal models. Experimental evaluation has been performed on a simple example and leadto the refinement of the designed goal model upon the analysis of the system'srun-time behaviour.

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