Reviewing the use of requirements engineering techniques in the development of multi-agent systems

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic literature review to investigate which techniques have been applied to give support to the requirements engineering activity in the development of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). We reviewed 49 of 389 papers found that were directly related to our goal. The results show that most of the proposals for dealing with requirements (78%) use already defined methods or techniques, and that 67% of these techniques are based on the goal-oriented paradigm. A total of 96% of the reviewed papers focus on techniques for analyzing requirements and only 39% of them explicitly consider some kind of elicitation technique. The results are important for determining current research activities in Requirements Engineering for MAS and for the identification of research gaps for further investigation. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.