Design and evolution of sociotechnical systems: A requirements Engineering perspective

Fatma Basak Aydemir PhD Thesis Defence
27 April 2016
April 27, 2016

Date: April 27, 2016
Time: 14:30
Location: Meeting room Garda - Polo Scientifico e Tecnologico "Fabio Ferrari" (Building Povo 1, via Sommarive 5 – Povo, Trento)

Speaker
Fatma Basak Aydemir, University of Trento

Abstract 
Sociotechnical systems are systems of systems where social, technical, and organizational systems interact with each other to satisfy their requirements. The participating systems have some degree of autonomy, and their requirements might be in conflict. The boundaries between social and technical systems are blurred. Internal and external factors trigger changes towards different directions. These essential characteristics of sociotechnical systems presents a challange for design and evolution.
These thesis propose modeling languages processes as well as analysis techniques to support sociotechnical system design and evolution from requirements engineering perspective. We propose a systematic design process and a formal language to aid social systems refine their requirements into other requirements and social interactions to generate interaction and system specifications that satisfy requirements. We explore the design space created during the design process with AI planing to discover sequence of actions to satisfy requirements with minimal cost. 
We adopt an iterative approach for handling requirements evolution and focus on the problem of selecting the optimal set of requirements for the next release. We capture synergies among requirements in goal-oriented requirements models and transform the next release problem into a multi-objective satisfiability modulo theories/optimization modulo theories problem and solve it using an external reasoner. We apply a similar approach for risk analysis using goal models. We model goals, risks, and treatments in three layers and solve multi-objective risk analysis problem with SMT/OMT reasoning.     
We evaluate our proposal with self-evaluation studies, a case study and scalability experiments and report results.  

Contact: Fatma Basak Aydemir, fatmabasak.aydemir [at] unitn.it