Agent-Oriented Modeling for a Dynamic and Evolving World

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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.