D ESEN
Abstract
We address the problem of engineering a sociotechnical system (STS) with respect to its stakeholders’ requirements. We motivate a two-tier STS conception composed of a technical tier that provides control mechanisms and describes what actions are allowed by the software components, and a social tier that characterizes the stakeholders’ expectations of each other in terms of norms. We adopt agents as computational entities, each representing a different stakeholder. Unlike previous approaches, our framework, D ESEN , incorporates the social dimension into the formal verification process. Thus, D ESEN supports agents potentially violating applicable norms—a consequence of their autonomy. In addition to requirements verification, D ESEN supports refinement of STS specifications via design patterns to meet stated requirements. We evaluate D ESEN at three levels. We illustrate how D ESEN carries out refinement via the application of patterns on a hospital emergency scenario. We show via a human-subject study that a design process based on our patterns is helpful for participants who are inexperienced in conceptual modeling and norms. We provide an agent-based environment to simulate the hospital emergency scenario to compare STS specifications (including participant solutions from the human-subject study) with metrics indicating social welfare and norm compliance, and other domain dependent metrics.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Dec 16, 2019
- Source ID
- 10.1145/3365664
Entities
People
- Munindar P. Singh
- Nirav Ajmeri
- Özgür Kafalı
Organizations
- North Carolina State University
- United States Department of Defense
- University of Kent