Designing JADE systems with the support of CASE tools and patterns

In the last years, multi-agent systems (MAS) have proved m ore and more successful. The need of a quality software engineering approach to their de sign arises together with the request of new tools that could support a quick, affordable and costprofitably 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 design r 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 wi th 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.