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06104500 Fortino, Giancarlo Rango, Francesco Russo, Wilma Engineering multi-agent systems through statecharts-based JADE agents and tools. Nguyen, Ngoc Thanh (ed.), Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence VII. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-642-32065-1/pbk). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7270. Journal Subline, 61-81 (2012). 2012 Berlin: Springer EN Statecharts Software agents JADE Visual programming Automatic code generation CASE tool

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-32066-8_3

Summary: The JADE framework, which is one of the most used in the AOSE community to program and execute multi-agent systems (MASs), still needs to be further supported by methods and tools for enabling a more effective modeling and prototyping of JADE-based MASs. In this paper we propose a framework and a related tool supporting a Statecharts-based development of JADE-based MAS with the purpose of providing an effective approach for engineering multi-agent systems and leveraging agent-oriented development methodologies and processes adopting JADE as target agent platform. In particular, a framework for programming JADE behaviors through a variant of the Statecharts, named Distilled StateCharts (DSCs), has been first developed by enhancing the JADE add-on HSMBehaviour. Then, to enable rapid prototyping of JADE agents, a visual tool for DSCs has been extended with translation rules based on the developed framework that allows to automatically translate DSC specifications into DSC-based JADE behaviors. The proposed approach is exemplified through a case study concerning an agent-based meeting organization system.