An Empirical Study of Patterns in Agent Programs

Various agent programming languages and frameworks have been developed by now, but very few systematic studies have been done as to how the language constructs in these languages may and are in fact used in practice. Performing a study of these aspects contributes to the design of best practices or programming guidelines for agent programming. Following a first empirical study of agent programs written in the Goal agent programming language for the dynamic blocks world, in this paper we perform a considerably more extensive analysis of agent programs for the first-person shooter game Unreal Tournament 2004. We identify and discuss several structural code patterns based on a qualitative analysis of the code, and analyze for which purposes the constructs of Goal are typically used. This provides insight into more practical aspects of the development of agent programs, and forms the basis for development of programming guidelines and language improvements.