Recommended practices for the specification of multi-agent systems requirements

Abstract

The lack of process standardization in the development of multi-agent systems (MAS) causes a great deal of difficulty for developers in addressing major development phases, such as requirements analysis. Instead, such MAS infrastructure is generally attended to in an ad-hoc fashion and important aspects of requirements analysis are often neglected altogether. The IEEE Std 830 model plays a key role in standardizing requirement specifications (SRS) for complex development of conventional software. Knowing that MAS are a natural and logical evolution of the conventional software development paradigms, we believe that the MAS requirement phase can thoroughly benefit from applying such a specific standard model in such a way that results in a high-quality and more accepted SRS artifact. Our purpose in this paper is to utilize and extend the IEEE Std 830-2009 model to specify requirements of multi-agent systems.