Extensão de um metamodelo para a especificação de requisitos em um contexto de agentes de tempo real

Abstract

The demand for software applications, called multi-agent systems containing autonomous entities with the capability of operating and taking decisions without external interventions is growing. However, there are challenges in the development of this kind of system, such as the correct requirements specification. Though this is a crucial question in the development of any software, multi-agent systems own particular requirements, since the agents that compose it must be autonomous and, when following the BDI model, they must own beliefs, goals, and plans, as well as be able to perceive the environment and act upon it. When a agent (in general interpreting a role) believe that a goal can be achieved, he pass to act to accomplish this goal, generally by means of the execution of a plan. However, only the intention to achieve a goal does not guarantee that the goal will be concluded, much less that it will be achieved in the expected time. This way, researchers are beginning to use real-time agents to solve troubles affected by temporal constraints. In order to address the requirements specification of this kind of system, some studies had extended the metaclasses used to produce UML use case diagrams in order to represent multi-agent systems particular requirements. However, by means of a systematic mapping, we identified that, presently, mostly of the proposals are still designing their systems without considering temporal restrictions associated to the goals and other behaviors of agent roles. Thus, in this paper we performed an extension of an agency metamodel to represent temporary constraints on requirements applicable to real-time agent roles. In addition, a metamodel was installed in the OCL rule set, which restricted associations only between agents and their real-time results. As an evaluation, an experiment was performed, by means of a focus group, with master degree students.