Designing realistic multi-agent systems is a complex process, which involves specifying not only the functionality of individual agents, but also the authority relationships and lines of communication existing among them. In other words, designing a multi-agent system refers to designing an agent organisation. Existing methodologies follow a wide variety of approaches to designing agent organisations, but they do not provide adequate support for the decisions involved in moving from analysis to design. Instead, they require designers to make ad hoc design decisions while working at a low level of abstraction.

We have developed RAMASD (Role Algebraic Multi-Agent System Design), a method for semi-automatic design of agent organisations based on the concept of role models as first-class design constructs. Role models represent agent behaviour, and the design of the agent system is done by systematically allocating roles to agents. The core of this method is a formal model of basic relations between roles, which we call role algebra. The semantics of this role-relationships model are formally defined using a two-sorted algebra.

In this paper, we review existing agent system design methodologies to highlight areas where further work is required, describe how our method can address some of the outstanding issues and demonstrate its application to a case study involving telephone repair service teams.