From Social Designs to Multi-Agent Architectures

A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is an organization of coordinated au-tonomous agents that interact in order to achieve common goals. Consid-ering real world social organizations as an analogy, this paper 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 mod-eled within a conceptual framework analyzing them from five points of view: social, intentional, structural, communicational and dynamic. An e-business example illustrates our purpose