Towards a Formal Methodology for Designing Multi-agent Applications

This paper has two purposes. First, it defines a formal language for specifying multi-agent systems. This language is expressive enough to cover individual agent aspects (knowledge, goals, roles, ...) as well as collective aspects of in terms of coordination protocols, organization structure and planning activities. Second, it provides a formal design methodology based on stepwise refinements allowing to develop a design specification starting from an abstract requirements one.