Adaptive agent negotiation for software process modeling

Abstract

Most Software process models are predefined. When applied in changing environments, they have to be adapted manually. To this end, this paper proposes an adaptive multilateral negotiation model for software process modeling, namely AMNM-PA. AMNM-PA uses Agents to represent the entities involved in software processes, such as organizations, teams, persons, etc. and dynamically and adaptively constructs software process models for given software projects by negotiating among the Agents. AMNM-PA is based on non-stationary finite-horizon Markov decision processes and uses the model-independent Q learning algorithm to choose negotiation strategies, thus supports the dynamic and adaptable negotiation in changing and unknown environments meeting the requirement for environmental adaptability of the software process modeling. AMNM-PA has been implemented in the software process management system SoftPM. © by Institute of Software, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.