Agent-Oriented Modeling for a Dynamic and Evolving World

近年来，软件和信息技术（IT）的连续进步浪潮改变了社会。我们的工作、娱乐和社会互动现在都由IT系统复杂地调节。然而，新兴技术即将引发另一轮转型。低成本传感器网络、物联网、位置感知和移动设备以及先进的数据分析和商业智能相结合，将在“感知和解读”方面带来一场新的数字革命。当与为执行预定义过程和交互而高度开发的现有IT基础设施相结合时，新兴的企业范围IT体系结构将帮助组织对其日益快速变化的环境变得更加敏感和适应。该研究项目旨在开发一个建模框架，以帮助概念化、分析和设计各种软件和IT系统的互补应用程序，从而在高度动态和快速发展的环境中实现业务和组织目标。在信息系统和软件工程中，系统设计师和架构师主要依赖于适当的模型来构思、描述、分析和管理复杂的系统。需求工程领域已经开发了一些模型和技术，这些模型和技术有助于将对系统的“业务”级理解与系统的技术设计和实现连接起来。近年来，该领域已经从早期关注单个系统的详细规范扩展到包括企业范围的范围，从业务策略到策略和计划，到业务流程，再到技术系统。在这个项目中，由于认识到新一代“感知和解释”技术的快速采用，我们将开发一个新的建模框架来支持新的数字革命，其中软件和数据将在感知和解释方面提供数量级的进步，就像过去的IT进步导致了执行效率的数量级增长一样。软件架构的进步也推动了数字革命的新阶段，这些架构提供了更大的灵活性和适应性，例如云和面向服务的计算，以及具有自适应能力的软件架构。在本研究中开发的框架将指导企业范围架构的开发，该架构将利用感知和解释技术来利用新软件架构提供的适应性，克服传统IT系统中常见的刚性。该框架将帮助系统设计者和企业架构重新考虑设计时和运行时之间的边界，以及人员和自动化系统之间责任的重新分配。新的革命还可以改变软件工程过程，因为一些知识密集型活动（包括需求工程活动）可能从设计时迁移到运行时，以利用来自环境的近实时输入。该项目将建立、适应并大量扩展面向i*代理的建模框架，这是面向目标的需求工程的主要框架。它强调了在复杂软件和It应用环境中分析半自治参与者之间的战略利益和社会关系的必要性。i*框架源于申请人的博士论文，是国际标准的基础。拟议的研究将借鉴不同学科的概念，从战略管理到软件架构再到社会生态学。与加拿大工业的案例研究将用于推导框架要求并验证结果。

Successive waves of advances in software and information technologies (IT) have transformed society in recent years. Our work, play, and social interactions are now intricately mediated by IT systems. Yet, newly emerging technologies are about to trigger another round of transformation. Low-cost sensor networks, the Internet of Things, location-aware and mobile devices, and advanced data analytics and business intelligence, when used in combination, will bring about a new digital revolution in “sensing and interpreting”. When coupled with existing IT infrastructures which are highly developed for executing pre-defined procedures and interactions, the emerging enterprise-wide IT architectures will help organizations become much more responsive and adaptive to their increasingly rapidly changing environments. This research project aims to develop a modeling framework to help conceptualize, analyze, and design the complementary application of diverse software and IT systems to achieve business and organizational goals in highly dynamic and rapidly evolving environments. In information systems and software engineering, system designers and architects rely crucially on appropriate models to conceive, describe, analyze, and manage complex systems. The field of Requirements Engineering has developed models and techniques that help bridge a “business” level understanding of a system to its technical design and implementation. In recent years, the field has expanded from an earlier focus on detailed specification of individual systems to encompass an enterprise-wide scope, connecting from business strategy to policies and plans, to business processes, to technology systems. In this project, in recognizing the rapid adoption of a new crop of “sense-and-interpret” technologies, we will develop a new modeling framework to support the new digital revolution, one in which software and data will offer orders-of-magnitude advances in sensing and interpreting, just as past IT advances had led to orders-of-magnitude gains in executional efficiency. This new phase of the digital revolution is also enabled by advances in software architectures which offer greater flexibility and adaptability such as cloud and service-oriented computing, as well as those with self-adaptive capabilities. The framework to be developed in this research will guide the development of enterprise-wide architectures that will leverage sense-and-interpret technologies to exploit the adaptability offered by the new software architectures, overcoming the rigidities common in traditional IT systems. The framework will help system designers and enterprise architectures rethink the boundary between design-time and run-time, and the re-allocation of responsibilities among humans and automated systems. The new revolution could also transform software engineering processes, as some knowledge-intensive activities (including requirements engineering activities) may migrate from design-time to run-time to leverage near-real-time input from the environment. The project will build on, adapt and substantially extend the i* agent-oriented modeling framework, a leading framework for goal-oriented requirements engineering. It highlights the need to analyze strategic interests and social relationships among semi-autonomous actors in the context of complex software and IT applications. The i* framework originated from the applicant’s PhD thesis, and is the basis for an international standard. The proposed research will draw upon concepts from diverse disciplines ranging from strategic management to software architecture to socio-ecology. Case studies with Canadian industry will be used to derive framework requirements and to validate results.