Reasoning about Requirements Evolution Using Clustered Belief Revision

During the development of system requirements, software system specifications are often inconsistent. Inconsistencies may arise for different reasons, for example, when multiple conflicting viewpoints are embodied in the specification, or when the specification itself is at a transient stage of evolution. These inconsistencies cannot always be resolved immediately. As a result, we argue that a formal framework for the analysis of evolving specifications should be able to tolerate inconsistency by allowing reasoning in the presence of inconsistency without trivialisation, and circumvent inconsistency by enabling impact analyses of potential changes to be carried out. This paper shows how clustered belief revision can help in this process. Clustered belief revision allows for the grouping of requirements with similar functionality into clusters and the assignment of priorities between them. By analysing the result of a cluster, an engineer can either choose to rectify problems in the specification or to postpone the changes until more information becomes available.

From SMART to agent systems development

n order for agent-oriented software engineering to prove effective it must use principled notions of agents and enabling specification and reasoning, while still considering routes to practical implementation. This paper deals with the issue of individual agent specification and construction, departing from the conceptual basis provided by the smart agent framework. smart offers a descriptive specification of an agent architecture but omits consideration of issues relating to construction and control. In response, we introduce two new views to complement smart: a behavioural specification and a structural specification which, together, determine the components that make up an agent, and how they operate. In this way, we move from abstract agent system specification to practical implementation. These three aspects are combined to create an agent construction model, actsmart, which is then used to define the AgentSpeak(L) architecture in order to illustrate the application of actsmart.

Prototype Generation from Ontology Charts

Semantic Analysis is a business analysis method designed to capture system requirements. While these requirements may be represented as text, the method also advocates the use of Ontology Charts to formally denote the system's required roles, relationships and forms of communication. Following model driven engineering techniques, Ontology Charts can be transformed to temporal Database schemas, class diagrams and component diagrams, which can then be used to produce software systems. A nice property of these transformations is that resulting system design models lend themselves to complicated extensions that do not require changes to the design models. For example, resulting databases can be extended with new types of data without the need to modify the database schema of the legacy system. Semantic Analysis is not widely used in software engineering, so there is a lack of experts in the field and no design patterns are available. This make it difficult for the analysts to pass organizational knowledge to the engineers. This study describes an implementation that is readily usable by engineers, which includes an automated technique that can produce a prototype from an Ontology Chart. The use of such tools should enable developers to make use of Semantic Analysis with minimal expertise of ontologies and MDA.