Reasoning of Competitive Non-Functional Requirements in Agent-Based Models

During the decision-making process in real-time competitive environments, there is a need to perform concurrent optimisation of multiple competitive objectives to select an optimal design decision for interdependent stakeholders. To handle such issues, this thesis successfully assimilates the goal-oriented requirements-engineering knowledge with analytical decision-making approaches to facilitate reasoning and analysis by encouraging stakeholders’ involvement. This leads to optimal decisions with domain knowledge improvement in the agent-based i*-goal model by balancing multiple conflicting non-functional requirements reciprocally

CEA Based Reasoning with the i∗ Framework

Goal models in requirement engineering represent stakeholder interests and objectives and help in making decisions when choosing suitable functional requirements based on non- functional requirements. In a competitive environment, stakeholders\u27 requirements may be conflicting and non-functional. Therefore, there is a need for a goal analysis method which offers an alternative design option that can accommodate the conflicting goals of the different inter-dependent actors in a goal model. In this paper, an economic evaluation-based approach known as Cost-Effectiveness Analysis is applied to the selection of an optimum strategy for inter-dependent actors in the i* goal model by balancing the opposing goals reciprocally. The proposed approach involves the optimisation of each objective function based on the interdependency relationships and economic evaluation of their optimal values to prioritise each design option. This helps to facilitate the choice of a cost-effective design option that can accommodate conflicting goals