Refining Goal Models by Evaluating System Behaviour

Nowadays, information systems have to perform in complex, heterogeneous environments, considering a variety of system users with different needs and preferences. Software engineering methodologies need to cope with the complexity of requirements specification in such scenarios, where new requirements may emerge also at run-time and the system’s goals are expected to evolve to meet new stakeholder needs. Following an agent-oriented approach, we are studying methods and techniques to design adaptive and evolvable information systems able to fulfill stakeholders’ objectives. In a previous work we defined an Agent-Oriented framework to design and code system specifications in terms of goal models and we instantiated it in a tool-supported process which exploits the Agent-Oriented Software Engineering methodology Tropos and the Multi-Agent Platform JADE/Jadex. In this paper, we show how to use this framework to develop a system following an iterative process, where the system execution allows enriching the system specification given in terms of goal models. Experimental evaluation has been performed on a simple example and lead to the refinement of the designed goal model upon the analysis of the system’s run-time behaviour.