Intelligent decision support system for COTS based software development

基于商业现成(COTS)的软件开发(CBSD)过程依赖于识别、评估和选择满足系统需求、满足利益相关者偏好的COTS产品。侧重于第二个目标的方法大多基于协商一致的办法，在这种办法中，利益攸关方必须首先商定解决办法的评价标准及其相对重要性。然后，开发团队必须根据解决方案评估标准来评估不同COTS候选对象的功能，以选择最合适的COTS。然而，这种方法有几个问题：(1)在许多情况下，不可能协调利益相关者的关切并就解决方案评价标准达成一致；(2)可能缺少尝试不同方案来处理相互冲突的利益相关者偏好的手段；(3)通常不处理一个(或多个)利益相关者在谈判过程中改变他/她的偏好的情况；(4)忽视利益相关者之间的联盟形成；(5)有时不处理评估过程中固有的不确定性和相互依赖关系；(6)集中或遗漏重复使用以前评估过程中的信息的存储库；(7)利益相关者重要性程度不同的情况通常被忽视。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种截然不同的方法，其中(A)不需要初步协商一致；(B)上述缺陷得到充分解决；(C)经验储存库是分散的，几乎不需要维护。多智能体系统(MAS)和基于本体的知识管理(OKM)的使用是该项目的独特之处。使用MAS实现系统提供了灵活性、可扩展性和对用户隐藏的复杂性，并允许智能消息传递和知识级协商。开放知识管理允许对知识进行动态分类和分发，适应多样化的内容、表现形式和个性化的风格；采用有效的检索机制；几乎不需要或几乎不需要集中管理和维护。

Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Based Software Development (CBSD) process relies on identifying, evaluating and selecting COTS products that satisfy system requirements, and satisfy stakeholders' preferences. The methodologies that focus on the second target are mostly based on the consensus approach in which the stakeholders have to first agree on the solution evaluation criteria and their relative importance. Then, the developer team has to evaluate the functionality of different COTS candidates against the solution evaluation criteria to select the most suitable COTS. However, there are several problems with such approaches: (1) in many cases it not possible to harmonize concerns of the stakeholders and agree on the solution evaluation criteria; (2) means for trying out different scenarios to deal with conflicting stakeholders' preferences may be missing; (3) situations where one (or more) stakeholder changes his/her preferences during the negotiation process is not usually dealt with; (4) coalition formation among stakeholders is ignored; (5) uncertainty and interdependencies inherent in the evaluation process are sometimes left unaddressed; (6) repositories for reuse of information from previous evaluation processes are either centralized or left out; and (7) cases where stakeholders have differing degree of significance are usually ignored. In this research we suggest a radically different approach in which (a) initial consensus is not required; (b) the above deficiencies are fully addressed; and (c) experience repositories are decentralized and require little or no maintenance. The use of multi-agent systems (MAS) and ontology-based knowledge management (OKM) are unique points in this project. Implementing the system using MAS offers flexibility, expandability and hiding complexity from users and allows for intelligent message passing and knowledge level negotiation. OKM allows for dynamic classification and distribution of knowledge, adapting to diversified contents, representations and personalized styles; incorporates efficient retrieval mechanisms; and requires virtually less or no centralized management and maintenance.