INTROSPECTING AGENT-ORIENTED DESIGN PATTERNS
Manuel Kolp, Thanh Tung, Stéphane Faulkner · WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2005
Abstract. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity over tradi-tional ones for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by today’s cor-porate IT applications such as eBusiness systems, web services or enterprise knowledge bases. Since the fundamental concepts of multi-agent systems are social and intentional rather than object, functional, or implementation-oriented, the design of MAS architec-tures can be eased by using social patterns. They are detailed agent-oriented design idi-oms to describe MAS architectures as composed of autonomous agents that interact and coordinate to achieve their intentions, like actors in human organizations. This paper pre-sents social patterns and focuses on a framework aimed to gain insight into these pat-terns. The framework can be integrated into agent-oriented software engineering meth-odologies used to build MAS. We consider the Broker social pattern to illustrate the framework. The mapping from system architectural design (through organizational archi-tectural styles), to system detailed design (through social patterns), is overviewed with a data integration case study. The automation of patterns design is also overviewed.