In this paper we describe work in progress concerning the (semi-)automatic support for developing agents. We focus on the scenario in which agents have to be designed to follow an electronic institution. An initial design pattern is automatically extracted from a given electronic institution and oered to programmers willing to develop agents for the speci c purpose of joining and performing in the electronic institution. We resort to logic programming as our underlying computational framework, explaining and justifying this decision.

Abstract. Prototyping is a valuable technique to help software engineers explore the design space while gaining insight on the dynamics of the system. In this paper, we describe a method for rapidly building prototypes of large multi-agent systems using logic programming. Our method advocates the use of a description of all permitted interactions among the components of the system, that is, the protocol, as the starting specification. The protocol is represented in a way that allows us to automatically check for desirable properties of the system to be built. We then employ the same specification to synthesise agents that will correctly follow the protocol. These synthesised agents are simple logic programs that engineers can further customise into more sophisticated software. Our choice of agents as logic programs allows us to provide semi-automatic support for the customisation activity. In our method, a prototype is a protocol with a set of synthesised and customised agents. Executing the prototype amounts to having these agents enact the protocol. We have implemented and described a distributed platform to simulate prototypes. 1.

. The design of program transformations is a dicult and error-prone task. We propose a practical approach to help programmers devise their program transformations: the programmer is to supply two versions of the same logic program, an inecient one and another with a better computational performance, and the set of syntactic adjustments required to map them is automatically found. These adjustments are represented as transformations using an extended language based in program schemata and are subsequently made more generic, becoming applicable to a larger class of programs and thus extending the benets of the transformation. 1 Introduction Research on program transformation has proposed and validated methods for developing correct program transformations (e.g., [6], [8] and [2]). The correctness of a transformation refers to whether the meaning of a program (expressed in some form of semantics) is preserved after the alterations prescribed by the transformation are applied ...