The ATeam Design Pattern Useful Properties for Using Teams of Mobile Agents.pdfVIP

The A-Team Design Pattern: Useful Properties for Using Teams of Mobile Agents Seng W. Loke School of Computer Science and Software Engineering Monash University, Victoria 3145, Australia E-mail: swloke@.au Abstract We introduce a design pattern which we call A-Team that advocates building applications in terms of teams of agents with specific relationships among them. These relationships are captured in seven properties that relate agents with each other that will help the user understand the effect of sending out mobile agents in specific situations (e.g., as batches at different points in time), particularly when agents in one batch might int erfere (positively or negatively) with agents in a subsequent batch. We advocate that the developer of a team of agents would consider building their agents in such a way as to incorporate some of these properties. We briefly illustrate our ideas with agents for helping users in wireless environments. 1 Introduction Mobile agents are software components that can be deployed on remote hosts to work autonomously. Such agents can move on their own volition or be moved from host to host when performing their tasks. Various design patterns and programming patterns have been developed to help construct applications with mobile agents for the purposes of coordination, interaction and travelling [3,4,5]. Examples of such patterns include master-slave, and itinerary. There has also been work on design patterns for multiagent coordination such as broker, embassy, mediator, and wrapper, which emphasizes roles agents play [1], an