ITACASE: A Tool Supporting the Design of MAS using the Gaia Methodology

Gaia was one of the first agent-based methodologies to exploit the organizational abstractions, to provide clear guidelines for the analysis and design of complex multiagent systems. Moreover, the clear processes and models Gaia proposes have awakened a great interest for such methodology in the agent research arena. Nevertheless, a current successful design methodology should include some other strategic factors to obtain its adoption in the industrial environment. Among them, the support of a specific CASE tool to simplify the work of the designer according to the methodology design process may encourage the industrial software engineers to use it in their real world projects. For this purpose, the present study introduces ITACASE, a CASE which covers all the phases of Gaia allowing agent engineers to produce and document the corresponding models.