1 Designing JADE systems with the support of CASE tools and patterns Massimo Cossentino 1 , Luca Sabatucci 1 , Antonio Chella 1,2 1 ICAR/CNR – Istituto di Calcolo e Reti ad Alte Prestazioni/Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche c/o CUC, Viale delle Scienze, 90128 Palermo, Italy cossentino@cere.pa.cnr.it 2 DINFO - Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Università degli Studi di Palermo Viale delle Scienze, 90128 Palermo, Italy sabatucci@csai.unipa.it, chella@unipa.it Abstract In the last years, multi-agent systems (MAS) have proved more and more successful. The need of a quality software engineering approach to their design arises together with the request of new tools that could support a quick, affordable and cost- profitably development process. In this work we describe two different aspects of these topics: the support that a CASE tool specifically conceived for MASs can provide to the designer and the impact that patterns of agents can have in the systems production. Both of these issues have, in our approach, a common denominator that is the PASSI (Process for Agent Societies Specification and Implementation) design methodology since the CASE tool we will describe has been built to work with it and our patterns are totally integrate with this process. We will complete our discussion with some examples of the functionalities offered by these tools. 1 Introduction Several proposals exist for methods and representations of agent-based systems [3][4] [5][6]. Because research about agency is still an open topic, some proposed representations involve abstractions of social phenomena and knowledge [3][5]. Others address implementation issues and have higher fidelity models (e.g. [4][6]). One response to these developments is to treat agent-based software the same as other types. That is, there is no need for methods or representations specifically for agent- based software. We reject this view because it is more natural to describe agents in psychological and social language. As a consequence, we think that design methodologies and even design tools that we commonly use to design object-oriented systems are not the best way to work on the agent-oriented software. Many aspects of the OO world can be profitably reused but a proper support of the agents peculiarities is necessary and this should originate new methodologies and specifically conceived design tools. We propose PASSI (Process for Agent Societies Specification and Implementation) [8] and the tools that support it (PTK and AgentFactory) as a solution to the above arguments. This methodology is the result of a long period of study and experimentation mainly in robotics [6]. It is composed of five models (System Requirements, Agent Society, Agent Implementation, Code Model and Deployment Model) which include several distinct phases. The advantages of using PASSI rather than other methodologies, derive from the complete support that is has from PTK and AgentFactory. PTK is an add-in for a diffused commercial UML-based CASE tool