An expert system for the design of agents

The growing interest for the design and development of multi-agent systems has brought to the creation of a specific research area called Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE), specifically conceived for the development of complex systems. The development of such systems needs the support of appropriate tools that could help the designer in producing the design artefacts. We developed a tool called Metameth that may be used to define a new (agent-oriented) design process as well as to apply it. In this paper, we describe only a slice of this complex tool, specifically addressing the interaction with human actors (the designers). This subsystem is conceived as a collaborative multi-agent expert system, where each agent is capable of reasoning and adapting itself in order to support the designer in performing different kinds of design activities, regarding the use of various notations, and process life-cycles. ©2007 IEEE.