Design assistant agents for supporting requirement specification definition in a distributed design team

摘要

In this paper, we first discuss the necessity of a support system for distributed multi-lingual development teams, to bridge the gaps between different languages, cultures and social systems of a client and a vendor when defining a requirement specification of an application system. Next, we propose the design of an agent-based support system for defining requirement specifications, consisting of collaborating design assistant agents, common design support functions and a language translation web service. To implement the approach we plan to use OMAS, a platform for developing multi-agent systems. OMAS has features for describing multi-lingual ontologies and multi-lingual representations of dialogs. It also provides a platform for testing multi-cultural cooperation over the Internet. Some experimental applications are being developed currently using different natural languages. In this paper, we propose an agent-based support system for requirement specification definition as one such application. The proposed system is a web-based and agent-based application and supports a multi-lingual software design team using a network of personal design assistant agents.