Social Patterns for Designing Multiagent Systems

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures now appear to be more appropriate than traditional ones for building latest generation software that is typically concurrent, distributed, and dynamic. Since the fundamental concepts of multi-agent systems are social and intentional, rather than object, functional or implementation-oriented, the design of MAS architectures should be eased by using what we call social patterns rather than object-oriented design patterns. Social patterns are idioms inspired by social and intentional characteristics used to design the details of a system architecture. The paper presents a framework called SKWYRL used to gain insight into social patterns and help to conduct the design of a MAS architecture in terms of these newly proposed idioms. We define the Booking social pattern, to illustrate the modeling dimensions of SKWYRL. A framework for code generation is also presented.