Requirement Analysis for Interaction Protocols

Designing agent interaction protocols need first to consider what the requirements are. This is done in the requirement analysis phase. The output of this phase is an informal document written in natural language. To our best knowledge, this phase is barely considered in the literature neither in communication protocol engineering nor in interaction protocol engineering. As a consequence, it is difficult for designers to do it easily. Experience seems to be the key. In order to help designers, we propose to structure the requirement analysis document into fields. These fields gather protocol's features. This paper presents such document and applies the structuration to the electronic commerce protocol NetBill.