The application of an intelligent requirements engineering tool in an agent-based framework

This paper describes the integration of two software tools: an expert system for telecommunications system design (the RATS tool), and a generalized agent framework supporting collaboration among groups of agents (the CAG architecture). RATS (Requirements Assistant for Telecommunication Services) is a knowledge-based expert system designed to assist the developer of new telecommunication services. The CAG (Collaborative Agent Group) architecture is an agent-based framework designed to support development of collaborative agent Systems by providing message passing services, agent lookup services, and remote call services. This paper reports on how the RATS tool is split into an interface part and a server part, which are then placed within the CAG framework The outcome is a flexible CAD system for telecommunication service design.