Agent-oriented Requirements Modelling

We describe how reconstructing requirements specification using agents and UML helps to build a hierarchy of requirements knowledge which can then be transformed into a running agent system. With agents as the division units for organising functional requirements structurally, the relationship between different pieces of the requirements document appears more obvious and, checks for completeness and consistency are easier to perform. The approach has four steps: i) Goal Mapping, where we relate functional requirements to system goals; ii) Structural Modelling, where agents are identified and rules for these agents are specified; iii) Behavioural Modelling, where the business processes are documented in UML and XML, aiming at realising the system goals by participating agents; iv) Implementation, where a running agent system is automatically generated from the transformed requirements document. We illustrate the approach and its tool support using a real life case study. Using the knowledge from this, we discuss and evaluate the approach.

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