Towards early emergent property understanding: merging behavior space exploration and model-based software engineering

During early phases of complex systems engineering typically many structural and behavioral aspects are unclear. In particular, when it comes to constraints on the result of interactions between distributed components (emergent properties) current software engineering approaches provide limited support. Therefore, we propose an extension to current software models for describing the goals of interaction rather than the underlying decision logic. Further, we propose a generic algorithm for obtaining goal-oriented behavior. Finally, the concepts are evaluated in a case study.