Requirements Analysis of an Agent's Reasoning Capability

摘要

The aim of requirements analysis for an agent that is to be designed is to identify what characteristic capabilities the agent should have. One of the characteristics usually expected for intelligent agents is the capability of reasoning. This paper shows how a requirements analysis of an agent's reasoning capability can be made. Reasoning processes may involve dynamically introduced or retracted assumptions: 'reasoning by assumption'. It is shown for this type of reasoning how relevant dynamic properties at different levels of aggregation can be identified as requirements that characterize the reasoning capability. A software agent has been built that performs this type of reasoning. The dynamic properties have been expressed using the temporal trace language TTL and can and have been checked automatically for sample traces.