Agent-Oriented Design Patterns

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity over traditional ones for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by today’s corporate 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 architectures can be eased by using social patterns. They are detailed agent-oriented design idioms to describe MAS architectures as composed of autonomous agents that interact and coordinate to achieve their intentions, like actors in human organizations. This paper presents social patterns and focuses on a framework aimed to gain insight into these patterns. The framework can be integrated into agent-oriented software engineering methodologies used to build MAS. We consider the Broker social pattern as a combination of patterns and use it to illustrate the framework. The automatation of patterns design is also overviewed.