Requirements Engineering in the Development of Multi-Agent Systems: A Systematic Review

The goal of this paper is to investigate which requirements engineering techniques have been applied in the development of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and how they were applied. We performed a systematic review of 58 of a total of 835 papers found in scientific digital libraries. The results show that most of the proposals for dealing with requirements (79%) use already defined methods or techniques from other software development paradigms and that 69% of these techniques are based on the goal-oriented paradigm. A total of 95% of the reviewed papers focus on techniques for analyzing requirements, and only 45% of them explicitly consider some type of elicitation technique. Finally, only 5% of the papers give some empirical evidence about the effectiveness of their approaches by conducting empirical studies. The results of our study are particularly important in the determination of current research activities in Requirements Engineering for MAS and in the identification of research gaps for further investigation.