Abstract:

Design pattern gives general solutions to the repeatedlyoccuring problems on certain contexts. It has been widely used in objectoriented software engineering and proved to be helpful to improve the quality and efficiency of software development. We believe, the same design pattern will have various design details when adopting different implementation techniques, and different software development paradigms have their design patterns. As a novel paradigm, agentoriented software engineering has made great progress. Nowadays, many focuses have been put on how to improve its practices and to extend its applications. In this paper, pattern approach is integrated with agentoriented software engineering. Based on the characteristics of the agent technology, a number of agentoriented design patterns have been presented from multiple viewpoints such as structure, collaboration and agent architecture. A description framework for agentoriented design pattern is presented. An analysis of the typical agentoriented design pattern and its application case is conducted.

Key words: agent;design pattern;multiagent system;agent oriented software engineering