Architectural Design Patterns for Multiagent Coordination

This paper presents our rst step towards agent-oriented software engineering, focusing on the area of coordinated multi-agent systems. In multi-agent systems, the interactions between the agents are crucial in determining the eeectiveness of the system. Hence the adoption of an appropriate coordination mechanism is pivotal in the design of multi-agent system architectures. This paper does not focus on agent theory, rather on the development of an agent-oriented software engineering methodology, collaboration architectures and design patterns for collaboration. A catalog of coordination patterns inherent in multi-agent architectures is presented. Such patterns may be utilized in the architectural design for multiagent systems, allowing researchers and practitioners to improve the integrability and reusability properties of their systems.