Multiagent System Design Based on Object-Oriented Patterns.
Elizabeth A. Kendall, Margaret T. Malkoun, Chong H. Jiang · 1997
The relationships between agents and objects, and the role of object oriented analysis in multiagent system development have been discussed in earlier papers; these findings are employed here as a foundation for agent design. Patterns are flexible, reusable, and effective object oriented designs. The role of patterns for multiagent systems is discussed, and individual patterns are proposed to address agent concurrency, collaboration, and reasoning. The paper illustrates how to employ several patterns in concert to yield an architecture for multiagent systems, and clarifies how sets of objects can be employed to design agents, important software abstractions for pro- active behavior and distributed problem solving. 1.0 INTRODUCTION The term agent has various meanings in the literature. In this paper, we adopt the definitions of 25 . A weak agent is i) autonomous ii) social iii) reactive and iv) pro- active, and a strong agent, in addition to the above, has one or more of the followi...