A Novel Approach to Explore Inter Agent Dependencies from User Requirements

Inter-agent communication is one of the main concerns of Agent-Oriented requirements engineering that is delineated as managing inter-dependencies and interaction among various agents performing collaborative activities. In a Multi-Agent System (MAS), inter-agent dependencies would complicate the design of the system. Therefore, to reduce the complexity of such a system, it is immensely essential to scrutinize various dependencies during the delegation of a goal that would require precise interpretation of user requirements. To comprehend the user requirements, the proposed work employs lexical analysis which would assist developer to investigate a number of dependency factors. Further Euclidean distance is applied to check the proximity of dependency factors in user requirements to the threshold values of various dependencies. The upper and lower threshold values would assist in classifying various dependencies from user requirements. As dependency factors are often fuzzy and uncertain, therefore fuzzy system is employed. The proposed work offers a more explicit and systematic classification of the social dependencies as an integral part of the requirements engineering process that eventually would assist the developer to evaluate optimum number of dependee agents according to the type and nature of multiple dependencies and hence address inter-agent coordination issues within constrained resources to build MAS of high quality.