Agent design patterns: Elements of agent application design

Abstract

Agent technology is an emerging field and agent-based application design is still a pioneering discipline. We are all pioneers, inventing and re-inventing sometimes smart but perhaps more not-so-smart solutions to recurrent problems. It is here that agent design patterns can help by capturing good solutions to common problems in agent design. No special skills, language features, or other tricks are required for you to benefit from these patterns. Simply speaking, agent design patterns can make your applications more flexible, understandable, and reusable, which is probably why you were interested in agent technology in the first place. In this paper we report on several design patterns we have found in mobile agent applications.