Requirements Analysis for Socio-technical Systems: Exploring and Evaluating Alternatives

Early requirements analysis focuses on stakeholders and their goals, and explores alternative ways of fulfilling them through networks of actor delegations. The i* modeling framework is a popular way of modeling and analyzing early requirements. This paper frames the problem of designing actor dependency networks as a multi-agent planning problem and adopts off-the-shelf planners to offer a tool that generate alternative actor dependency networks, and evaluate them in terms of metrics derived from Game Theory literature. The paper presents in detail how planning can generate alternative networks, also describes the tool (P-Tool) that supports the planning process and generates alternatives. As well, we offer preliminary experimental results on the scalability of the approach.