Supporting requirements reuse in multi-agent system product line design and evolution

A principal goal of agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) is to provide the mechanisms for reusing, maintaining and allowing the evolution of agent-based software systems. Our AOSE methodology, Gaia-PL, enables the design and development of multi-agent system product lines (MAS-PL)¹ by providing the software engineering processes to define and reuse requirements specifications and design artifacts. In this paper we extend our Gaia-PL methodology with automated tool support to enable the reuse and verification of MAS-PL requirements to better facilitate specification reuse during both initial system development and evolution. Specifically, we show how use of our product-line requirements management and verification tool along with feature modeling can support correct variation point selection, reuse and MAS-PL evolution. We illustrate and evaluate this work through an application to a proposed NASA agent-based pico-spacecraft swarm.