Abstract
A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is an organization of coordinated autonomous agents that interact in order to achieve common goals. Considering real world social organizations as an analogy (Zambonelli et al. 2000), this chapter proposes architectural styles and design patterns for MAS which adopt concepts from social theories. The styles are intended to represent a macro-level architecture of a MAS in terms of actor, goal and actor dependency and are evaluated with respect to software quality attributes. At a micro-level, social patterns give a finer-grain description of the MAS architecture and define how goals assigned to agents will be fulfilled. They are modeled within a conceptual framework analyzing them from five points of view: social, intentional, structural, communicational and dynamic. An e-business example illustrates our purpose.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aridor, Y. and Lange, D.B. (1998), “Agent Design Patterns: Elements of Agent Application Design,” Proc. of the 2nd Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents (Agents’ 98), pp. 108–115, St Paul, Minneapolis, USA.
Bass, L., Clements, P., and Kazman, R. (1998), Software Architecture in Practice, Addison-Wesley.
Bauer, B., Muller, J.P., and Odell, J. (2001) “Agent UML: A Formalism for Specifying Multiagent Interaction,” Proc. of the 1st Int. Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE’00), pp. 121–140, Limerick, Ireland.
Bonati, P.A., Kraus, S., Salinas, J., and Subrahmanian, V.S. (1998), “Data-security in heterogeneous agent systems,” Cooperative Information Agents, pp. 290–305. Springer Verlag.
Buschmann, F., Meunier, R., Rohnert, H., Sommerlad, P., and Stal, M. (1996), Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture — a System of Patterns. John Wiley & Sons.
Chess, D. M. (1998), “Security Issues in Mobile Code Systems,” in Vigna, G. (ed.), Mobile Agents and Security, pp. 1–14. Springer-Verlag.
Deugo, D., Oppacher, F., Kuester, J., and Otte, I.V. (1999), “Patterns as a Means for Intelligent Software Engineering,” Proc. of the Int. Conf. of Artificial Intelligence (IC-AI’99), vol. II, pp. 605611, CSRA.
Do, T.T., Faulkner, S., and Kolp, M. (2003), “Organizational Multi-Agent Architectures for Information Systems,” Proc. of the 5th Int. Conf. on Enterprise Information Systems, (ICEIS’03), vol. IV, pp. 89–96, Angers, France.
Do, T.T., Kolp, M., and Pirotte, A. (2003a), “Social Patterns for Designing Multi-Agent Systems,” Proc. of the 15th Int. Conf. on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE’03), pp. 103–110, San Fransisco, USA.
Dussauge, P. and Garrette, B. (1999), Cooperative Strategy: Competing Successfully Through Strategic Alliances,Wiley and Sons.
Fox, M. (1981), “An Organizational View of Distributed systems,” Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 11 (1), pp. 7080.
Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, J., and Vlissides, J (1995), Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software,Addison-Wesley.
Hayden, S., Carrick, C., and Yang, Q. (1999), “Architectural Design Patterns for Multiagent Coordination,” Proc. of the 3rd Int. Conf. on Agent Systems, pp. 412–413, Seattle, USA.
Horling, B., Lesser, V., Vincent, R., Bazzan, A., and Xuan, P. (1999), “Diagnosis as an integral part of multi-agent adaptability,” Technical Report UM-CS-1999–003, University of Massachusetts, USA.
Kolp, M., Giorgini, P., and Mylopoulos, J. (2001), “A Goal-Based Organizational Perspective on Multi-Agents Architectures,” Proc. of the 8th Int. Workshop on Intelligent Agents: Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL’01), pp. 128–140, Seattle, USA.
Mintzberg, H. (1992), Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations,Prentice-Hall.
Morabito, J., Sack, I., and Bhate, A. (1999), Organization Modeling: Innovative Architectures for the 21st Century,Prentice Hall.
Pree, W. (1994), Design Pattern for Object Oriented Development,Addison Wesley.
Scott, W.R. (1998), Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems,Prentice Hall.
Shaw, M. and Garlan, D. (1996), Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, Prentice Hall.
Yoshino, M.Y. and Srinivasa Rangan, U. (1995), Strategic Alliances: an Entrepreneurial Approach to Globalization, Harvard Business School Press.
Yu, E. (1995), Modeling Strategic Relationships for Process Reengineering, PhD thesis, University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science, Canada.
Zambonelli, F., Jennings, N.R., and Wooldridge, M. (2000), “Organizational abstractions for the analysis and design of multi-agent systems,” Proc. of the 1st Intern. Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, pp. 127–141, Limerick, Ireland.
Zambonelli, F., Jennings, N.R., and Wooldridge, M. (2003), “Developing multiagent systems: the Gaia Methodology,” ACM Trans on Software Engineering and Methodology, 12 (3), pp. 317–370.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kolp, M., Tung Do, T., Faulkner, S., Hang Hoang, T.T. (2005). Architectural Styles and Patterns for Multi-Agent Systems. In: Design of Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-44516-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-44516-6_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-06177-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44516-6
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)