Completeness and consistency checking of system requirements: An expert agent approach

Abstract Specifying requirements is one of the most critical activities in any systems development effort. It is extremely important that the requirements specified for a desired system are complete and consistent; users, however, experience great difficulty in doing that. The problem becomes especially acute when the intended system is very complex. In this paper, we propose a framework which employs expert agents to assist users in the requirements definition process. The approach is defined within the context of RAPID-WS, an object-oriented tool that supports the Air Force weapon systems requirements development process. We describe how an expert agent uses a knowledge base and a case base to assist a user in defining a complete and consistent set of system requirements. The agent generates a requirements hierarchy for the user to view and dynamically responds to any changes to requirements made by the user. By allowing control to switch freely back and forth between the user and the agent, the proposed approach provides a collaborative medium for requirements specification.