Abstract—We address the challenge of requirements engineer-ing for sociotechnical systems, wherein humans and organizations supported by technical artifacts such as software interact with one another. Traditional requirements models emphasize the goals of the stakeholders above their interactions. However, the participants in a sociotechnical system may not adopt the goals of the stakeholders involved in its specification. We motivate, Protos, a requirements engineering approach that gives prominence to the interactions of autonomous parties and specifies a sociotech-nical system in terms of its participants ’ social relationships, specifically, commitments. The participants can adopt any goal they like, a key basis for innovative behavior, as long as they interact according to the commitments. Protos describes an ab-stract requirements engineering process as a series of refinements that seek to satisfy stakeholder requirements by incrementally expanding a specification set and an assumption set, and reducing requirements until all requirements are accommodated. We demonstrate this process via the London Ambulance System described in the literature. Index Terms—Requirements, refinement, architecture, commit-ments, teams, protocols I.

Abstract—We address the challenge of requirements engineer-ing for sociotechnical systems, wherein humans and organizations supported by technical artifacts such as software interact with one another. Traditional requirements models emphasize the goals of the stakeholders above their interactions. However, the participants in a sociotechnical system may not adopt the goals of the stakeholders involved in its specification. We motivate, Protos, a requirements engineering approach that gives prominence to the interactions of autonomous parties and specifies a sociotech-nical system in terms of its participants ’ social relationships, specifically, commitments. The participants can adopt any goal they like, a key basis for innovative behavior, as long as they interact according to the commitments. Protos describes an ab-stract requirements engineering process as a series of refinements that seek to satisfy stakeholder requirements by incrementally expanding a specification set and an assumption set, and reducing requirements until all requirements are accommodated. We demonstrate this process via the London Ambulance System described in the literature. Index Terms—Requirements, refinement, architecture, commit-ments, teams, protocols I.