Integration of system requirements and multiagent software architecture

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2005

RESUMO

Requirements Engineering and Software Architecture have become established areas of research, education and practice within the software engineering community. However, the two disciplines have evolved independently from each other and promising areas of mutual interest remain to be explored. Requirements Engineering is concerned with identifying the purpose of the system and the context in which it will be used. Software Architecture is related to the definition of software components and their properties and relationships. Additionally, Software Architecture has been recognised to have a deep impact on the achievement of non-functional requirements such as availability, reliability, maintainability, safety, confidentiality, evolvability, and so forth. There is a clear relationship between requirements and architectures. However, evolving and elaborating system requirements into software architectures satisfying those requirements is still a difficult task, mainly based on intuition. Understanding and supporting the interaction among software requirements and architectures remains one of the most challenging problems in software engineering research. To narrow these problems, we are proposing techniques for deriving architectural model in concert with Multi-Agent System (MAS) requirement specifications. This thesis proposes a framework to identify and map key architectural elements and the dependencies among these elements, based on the stated system requirements and organisational concepts. Our approach advocates that Multi-Agent System (MAS) corresponds to an organisational structure in which actors are members of a group in order to accomplish a goal. An organisation comprises groups, goals, members, roles and interactions. The basic idea behind the notion of groups is to provide the means to collectively refer to a set of roles performing a collaborative set of tasks to achieve their goals. A member assigned to roles does not work in isolation but interacts and cooperates with other roles. Our framework is based on two complementary models that separate the concerns of the social organisation from those of the architectural organisation. In the Organisational Model, the main goals are identified by understanding a requirement model of the functionality requested for the system. The organisation of the social system consists of roles and interactions, as intended by the system and its environment. Additionally, the goals and softgoals define the selection of an architectural style. In the Assignment Model, roles are clustered into sub-groups. These sub-groups are assigned to components, based on their similarity with the architectural components. The result is an architectural configuration, which is the allocation of sub-groups to architectural components

ASSUNTO(S)

multi-agent system (mas) sistemas multiagentes metodologias ciencia da computacao engineering and software architecture requisitos e arquitetura desenvolvimento de sistemas engenharia de software

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