Protos: Foundations for engineering innovative sociotechnical systems

Abstract

Abstract-We address the challenge of requirements engineering for sociotechnical systems, wherein humans and organizations supported by technical artifacts such as software interact with one another. Traditional requirements models emphasize the goals of the stakeholders above their interactions. However, the participants in a sociotechnical system may not adopt the goals of the stakeholders involved in its specification. We motivate, Protos, a requirements engineering approach that gives prominence to the interactions of autonomous parties and specifies a sociotechnical system in terms of its participants' social relationships, specifically, commitments. The participants can adopt any goal they like, a key basis for innovative behavior, as long as they interact according to the commitments. Protos describes an abstract requirements engineering process as a series of refinements that seek to satisfy stakeholder requirements by incrementally expanding a specification set and an assumption set, and reducing requirements until all requirements are accommodated. We demonstrate this process via the London Ambulance System described in the literature.

The Internet of Things and Multiagent Systems: Decentralized Intelligence in Distributed Computing

“…We would need to develop a methodology around the protocol languages that would support (1) refining stakeholder requirements into protocols, e.g., as in [39], [40]; (2) protocol verification tools, e.g., to verify safety and liveness of information protocols [34], [41] and to verify the satisfiability and falsifiability of norms [27]; (3) middleware to ensure correct decentralized enactment [42]; and (4) interaction-oriented programming models for agents, as described above. We term this overall methodology Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering (IOSE) [43] to distinguish it from Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE).…”

NANE: Identifying Misuse Cases Using Temporal Norm Enactments

“…The sociotechnical aspects of requirements engineering have been gaining prominence [10], [34]. NANE demonstrates a computational approach that goes beyond the conceptual work in previous approaches.…”

From Social Machines to Social Protocols

“…Approaches such as Colaba [10] that capture stakeholder rationales via arguments appear promising as do approaches such as Rodríguez et al's [32] that mine reusable model patterns from crowds. Protos [9] relates protocols to an abstract requirements engineering process, although it does not represent stakeholder rationales. A combination of such techniques is what is needed.…”