Dependency modeling consists of identifying actors which depend on one another for goals to be achieved, plans to be performed, and resources to be furnished. In particular, in the early requirement phase, it focuses on modeling goal dependencies between social actors of the organizational setting. New dependencies are elicited and added to the model upon goal analysis performed during the goal modeling activity discussed below. During late requirements analysis, dependency modeling focuses on analyzing the dependencies of the system-to-be actor. In the architectural design phase, data and control flows between sub-actors of the system-to-be actors are modeled in terms of dependencies, providing the basis for the capability modeling that will start later in architectural design together with the mapping of system actors to agents.

See The Tropos metamodel and its use and Tropos: An Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodology