The A-Team Design Pattern: Useful Properties for Using Teams of Mobile Agents
Seng W. Loke · 2003
We introduce a design pattern which we call A-Team that advocates building applications in terms of teams of agents with specific relationships among them. These relationships are captured in seven properties that relate agents with each other that will help the user understand the effect of sending out mobile agents in specific situations (e.g., as batches at different points in time), particularly when agents in one batch might interfere (positively or negatively) with agents in a subsequent batch. We advocate that the developer of a team of agents would consider building their agents in such a way as to incorporate some of these properties. We briefly illustrate our ideas with agents for helping users in wireless environments. 1