Abstract: The requirement engineering process aims to provide a requirements specification document that defines the system to be developed. In this paper, we focus on the negotiation phase for the requirements engineering process in cooperative information systems (CIS). However, inter-enterprise cooperation can generate conflicts and contradictions among enterprise objectives due to the heterogeneity of their interests. The negotiation includes the discussion of requirements conflict and the search for a compromise approved by all stakeholders. In order to improve this phase, we propose a new negotiation approach for requirements engineering in a cooperative context, which overcomes the following problems: requirements could be in conflict, and the existing conflicts cannot be explicitly well expressed, i.e. conflicts are often unknown. Our approach has two steps, where the first one treats conflict detection by using a matrix. The second step consists on applying heuristic and contract net protocols related to the multi-agent systems for the resolution of the conflicts under a negotiation process. The principal quality of CIS is to interoperate physical sites by respecting their autonomy in this perspective, the multi-agents paradigm propose concepts particularly interesting for the development of CIS, such as dynamic organization, autonomy of control, decentralization, and interaction that includes cooperation, coordination, and negotiation. Finally, we apply our approach on a case study to demonstrate its advantages in reducing the complexity and problems of the requirements engineering.
Keywords: Requirements engineering, requirements conflict, negotiation, cooperative information systems, multi-agent systems
