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Engineering requirements for adaptive systems

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Abstract

The increasing demand for complex and distributed software calls for novel software engineering methods and techniques, to create systems able to autonomously adapt to dynamically changing situations. In this paper, we present a framework for engineering requirements for adaptive software systems. The approach, called Tropos4AS, combines goal-oriented concepts and high-variability design methods. The Tropos4AS requirements model can be directly mapped to software prototypes with an agent-oriented architecture which can be executed for requirements validation and refinement. We give a comprehensive description of the framework, with conceptual models, modelling guidelines, and supporting tools. The applicability of the framework to requirements validation and refinement is illustrated through a case study. Two controlled experiments with subjects provide an empirical evaluation of the proposed modelling language, with statistical evidence of the effectiveness of the modelling approach for gathering requirements of adaptive systems.

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Notes

  1. Proactive maintain-goals require predictive reasoning mechanisms, and thus they are not easily representable in procedural agent languages in general [64], and approaches such as a “look-ahead with rollback” [28] are deployable only in specific domains.

  2. BDI (Belief–Desire–Intention) agents endow a reasoning cycle, are able to monitor the environment to update their belief, and to deliberate on the goals to achieve, selecting suitable plans [54].

  3. Tool for Agent-Oriented visual Modelling for Eclipse and its plugin t2x (Tropos4AS to Jadex), developed by the Software Engineering group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Trento [41, 50], available, including the extensions, at http://selab.fbk.eu/taom.

  4. http://www.activecomponents.org

  5. It has been successfully used in university courses on agent-oriented modelling and programming at the university of Trento.

  6. For this evaluation, we refer to the Tropos modelling language as defined in [9, 60] with the focus on Tropos goal diagrams, which are mainly affected by the proposed extensions.

  7. Note that we do not aim to a formal representation of requirements for which correctness and accuracy can be verified, as e.g. in Formal Tropos [25].

  8. Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) is a research centre located in Trento, Italy—see http://www.fbk.eu.

  9. The questionnaires, a detailed description and the anonymised raw data of the experiments are available at http://selab.fbk.eu/morandini/taom4e_eval/.

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  1. FBK Center for Communication and Information Technology, 38123, Povo, Trento, TN, Italy

    Mirko Morandini, Loris Penserini, Anna Perini & Alessandro Marchetto

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  1. Mirko Morandini
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Morandini, M., Penserini, L., Perini, A. et al. Engineering requirements for adaptive systems. Requirements Eng 22, 77–103 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-015-0236-0

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