Design Patterns for Social Intelligent Agent Architectures Implementation

Abstract

Multi-agent systems (MAS) architectures are popular for building open, distributed, and evolving software required by today's business IT applications such as e-business systems, web services, or enterprise knowledge bases. Since the fundamental concepts of MAS 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 chapter 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. The authors consider the broker social pattern to illustrate the framework. The mapping from system architectural design (through organizational architectural styles), to system detailed design (through social patterns), is overviewed with a data integration case study.