Modeling Mental States in Agent-Oriented Requirements Engineering

摘要

This paper describes an agent-oriented requirements engineering approach that combines informal i~* models with formal specifications in the mul-tiagent system specification formalism CASL. This allows the requirements engineer to exploit the complementary features of the frameworks, i~* can be used to model social dependencies between agents and how process design choices affect the agents' goals. CASL can be used to model complex processes formally. We introduce an intermediate notation to support the mapping between i~* models and CASL specifications. In the combined i~*-CASL framework, agents' goals and knowledge are represented as their mental states, which allows for the formal analysis and verification of, among other things, complex agent interactions and incomplete knowledge. Our models can also serve as high-level specifications for multiagent systems.