A combined specification language and development framework for agent-based application engineering

Software agents are used to solve several complex problems. Software engineering processes and tools are vital to support all the development phases of agent-based systems, and guarantee that these systems are built properly. Indeed, many modeling languages and implementation frameworks are available for system engineers. However, there are few methods that properly combine agent-oriented design and implementation initiatives. In this paper, we propose a development method that goes from the requirements elicitation to the actual implementation of agent systems using a modeling language and an implementation framework. We also present a case study to illustrate the suitability of our approach.