Modeling and reasoning intentional changes and their effects in social-technical systems with a goal-oriented approach

Changes happen either internally of a system or externally in the system environment, in many circumstances triggered by changes of human intentions. Modeling and reasoning human intentional changes is important because misunderstanding of these changes may lead to incorrect adaptations and system failures. It is also a difficult task since human intentions are hard to represent universally and to quantify by numbers or equations. This paper addresses this challenge based on discussions of the basic requirements for modeling and reasoning changes in social-technical systems. A change hierarchy is given to guide the discussion. A goal-oriented approach to modeling and reasoning intentional changes in social-technical systems is proposed by integrating desirable features from two methods. This approach is obtained by investigating the advantages and limitations of system dynamics modeling and the i* framework.