A Tool for Integrated Design and Implementation of Conversations in Multiagent Systems

Multiagent systems form promising paradigm for software development in complex application domains, but unfortunately tend to be complex systems themselves. The existing gap between analysis and design of multiagent systems and their implementation leads to an increased programming effort. In this paper, we present a graphical tool which tries to bridge this gap by integrating the design and implementation of agent conversations. The tool is implemented, as a plugin, for the integrated development environment Eclipse. Its use follows a conversation programming workflow which supports Agent UML and finite state machines as graphical notations. It is shown how the in-memory representation based on the description language cpXML, is automatically translated into source code for the multiagent framework JADE.