Requirements capture for Cougaar model-driven architecture system

The Cognitive Agent Architecture (Cougaar) is a distributed agent architecture framework originally developed to build large scale logistics applications for the Department of Defense. In order to facilitate rapid development of complex military and commercial Cougaar applications, we are devising "recipes" on how to automate the Cougaar application development process. The envisioned Cougaar Model Driven Architecture (CMDA) system will capture requirements from the user and automatically generate related software artifacts such as requirement, design, code and test cases. The automated generation of software artifacts, even if partial in nature, should considerably increase the productivity of Cougaar developers. Recognizing the sophistication of the Cougaar framework and the limitations of current transformation technologies, we have systematically developed an approach that combines component assembly in the large with transformations in the small. The approach's ability to generate accurate software artifacts depends largely on how user requirements are captured and transformed. The CMDA system employs innovative approaches and techniques to enable users represent their requirements properly. This paper briefly describes the CMDA system, its user interface and the various inputs captured from the user.