Towards Multi-Agent Software Prototyping

Integration and reusing of different kinds of information and software tools is a pressing necessity that more and more complex applications have to cope with. This fact and the distributed nature of many applications made it very appealing to use multi–agent technology. However, agent–based software still lacks well founded development methodologies, thus rapid prototyping and executable specifications could be very important for the realization of these applications. We present CaseLP, a specification framework for agent–based complex applications founded on Logic Programming. Many of the desirable features of an ideal system have already been implemented in CaseLP which, as a first prototype, has already been proven very useful in the case of some real applications. The paper outlines the general features of the system, describes some aspects of the implementation and presents two case studies that is, real–world applications that have been specified using CaseLP.