A product-line requirements approach to safe reuse in multi-agent systems

Abstract

The dynamic nature of highly autonomous agents within distributed systems is difficult to specify with existing requirements techniques. However, capturing the possibly shifting configurations of agents in the requirements specification is essential for safe reuse of agents. The contribution of this work is an extensible agent-oriented requirements specification template for distributed systems that supports safe reuse. We make two basic claims for this idea. First, by adopting a product-line-like approach, it exploits component reuse during system evolution. Second, the template allows ready integration with an existing tool-supported, safety analysis technique sensitive to dynamic variations within the components (i.e., agents) of a system. To illustrate these claims, we apply the requirements specification template and safety analysis to a real-world context-aware, distributed satellite system.