Intentions, an integral part of the mental state of an agent, play an important role in

Current trends in software development are increasingly reasoning about software applications in terms of multi-agent systems (MAS). However, the development of multi-agent applications is still a technically difficult task. One of the main barriers is the lack of comprehensive design practices to move systematically from problem analysis and agent models to effective implementations. This work describes a design approach to assist multi-agent development based on the notion of proto-frameworks, which proposes the materialization of agent models expressed in terms of architectural models into object-oriented counterparts, enabling then different implementation alternatives for multi-agent frameworks according to specific developers ´ needs. Keywords: Multi-agent development, design approach, frameworks, architectural styles. 1.