Modeling mental states in agent-oriented requirements engineering

This paper describes an agent-oriented requirements engineering approach that combines informal i* models with formal specifications in the multiagent system specification formalism CASL. This allows the requirements engineer to exploit the complementary features of the frameworks. i* can be used to model social dependencies between agents and how process design choices affect the agents' goals. CASL can be used to model complex processes formally: We introduce an intermediate notation to support the mapping between i* models and CASL specifications. In the combined i*-CASL framework, agents' goals and knowledge are represented as their mental states, which allows for the formal analysis and verification of; among other things, complex agent interactions and incomplete knowledge. Our models can also serve as high-level specifications for multiagent systems.