Design Patterns for Multi-Agent Systems

Design patterns document a field’s systematic knowledge derived from ex-periences. Despite the vast body of work in the field of multi-agent systems (MAS), design patterns for MAS are not popular among software practition-ers. As MAS have features that are widely considered as key to engineer-ing complex distributed applications, for example in manufacturing, robotics, ecommerce, traffic control and coordination, science simulations, it is impor-tant to provide a clear overview of existing patterns to make this knowledge accessible. To that end, a systematic literature review was performed covering the main publication venues of the field since 1998, resulting in 206 patterns. The study shows that (1) there is a lack of a standard template for doc-umenting design patterns for MAS, which hampers the use of patterns by practitioners, (2) associations between patterns are poorly described, which results in a lack of overview of the pattern space, (3) patterns for MAS have been used for a variety of application domains, which underpins their high potential for practitioners, and (4) classifications of design patterns for MAS are bounded to specific pattern catalogs, a more holistic view on the pattern space is missing. From the study, a number of guidelines is outlined that are important for future work on design patterns for MAS and their adoption in practice