iReDev: A Knowledge-Driven Multi-Agent Framework for Intelligent Requirements Development

2025-07-17

AI Summary

Requirements engineering faces challenges including inefficient stakeholder collaboration, difficulty in identifying conflicts, and poor integration of human expertise into intelligent agents; existing approaches provide inadequate support for human–agent collaboration. This paper proposes a knowledge-driven multi-agent requirements development framework comprising six functional agent types. It incorporates domain experts’ experience via explicit knowledge injection and enables end-to-end automated collaboration—spanning requirements elicitation, analysis, and specification—through an event-driven artifact pool communication paradigm. Its key innovations lie in embedding structured domain knowledge directly into agent decision-making processes and supporting real-time human–agent interaction via dynamic artifact-triggered mechanisms. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that the framework significantly outperforms baseline methods in requirements document quality, conflict identification accuracy, and responsiveness to newly emerging requirements.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures
• Multiagent Systems: Teamwork
• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search

Abstract

Requirements development is a critical phase as it is responsible for providing a clear understanding of what stakeholders need. It involves collaboration among stakeholders to extract explicit requirements and address potential conflicts, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Recently, multi-agent systems for software development have attracted much attention. However, existing research provides limited support for requirements development and overlooks the injection of human knowledge into agents and the human-agent collaboration. % To address these issues, this paper proposes a knowledge-driven multi-agent framework for intelligent requirement development, named iReDev. iReDev features: iReDev consists of six knowledge-driven agents to support the entire requirements development. They collaboratively perform various tasks to produce a software requirements specification. iReDev focuses on integrating human knowledge for agents, enabling them to simulate real-world stakeholders. iReDev uses an event-driven communication mechanism based on an artifact pool. Agents continuously monitor the pool and autonomously trigger the next action based on its changes, enabling iReDev to handle new requirements quickly. iReDev introduces a human-in-the-loop mechanism to support human-agent collaboration, ensuring that the generated artifacts align with the expectations of stakeholders. We evaluated the generated artifacts and results show that iReDev outperforms existing baselines in multiple aspects. We further envision three key directions and hope this work can facilitate the development of intelligent requirements development.

Problem

• Enhance requirements development with multi-agent collaboration
• Integrate human knowledge into automated agents effectively
• Improve stakeholder alignment via human-in-the-loop mechanisms

Innovation

• Knowledge-driven multi-agent framework for requirements
• Event-driven communication via artifact pool
• Human-in-the-loop for stakeholder alignment