Combining Requirements Engineering and Agents

Abstract

The concept of Agent is being used with different meanings and purposes in two separate fields of software engineering, namely Requirements Engineering and Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. After an introduction to Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) and its evolution into Agent-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE), this chapter provides a review of some of the main Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) methodologies, focusing on their support for requirements modeling. Then the chapter analyzes how both approaches to Agents relate to each other, what the differences are among them, and how they could benefit from each other. Problems are identified and discussed that need to be addressed for a successful integration of both fields, and recommendations are provided to advance in this direction.