Automating Software Design: Exploring and Evaluating Design Alternatives

Development of complex socio-technical IT systems is a very important and a relatively new problem for Software Engineering. Traditional software development methodologies should be revised and improved to capture properties of both human and artificial agents and interactions between them. This thesis proposal aims at building a framework for the automatic selection and evaluation of design alternatives. This is supposed to be done by (i) applying existing planning tools to automate the generation of design alternatives, and (ii) developing methods and algorithms for the evaluation and analysis of design alternatives based on game theory. Supporting tools will be developed to guide their users through the software design process.