From Organization Models to System Requirements: A 'Cooperating Agents' Approach

Increasingly, information systems development occurs in the context of existing systems and established organizational processes. Viewing organizational and system components as cooperating agents offers a way of understanding their inter-relationships and how these relationships would or should be altered as new systems are introduced. In this paper, we show how two agent-oriented frameworks can be used in combination during requirements engineering for cooperative information systems. The ALBERT language is used to specify requirements, in terms of states and actions, and information and perception. The framework is used to understand and redesign organizational processes, in terms of strategic relationships and rationales. A small banking example is used to illustrate how the requirements process may iterate between the two levels of modelling and analysis towards a requirements specification.