SABPO: A Standards Based and Pattern Oriented Multi-agent Development Methodology

Abstract

Organizational metaphor, in which each agent plays a specific role to achieve organization’s global goal(s), seems as the most suitable approach to model multi-agent systems. In this paper, a new methodology, which uses organizational metaphor as its basis and integrates this metaphor to the FIPA standards and well-known interaction protocols in a systematic way, is introduced. In addition to the proposed methodology, a new interaction pattern, which is called as “ontology inception”, is introduced. This pattern illustrates how the methodologists can mine new agent interaction patterns from the requirements and how these patterns can be inserted into the FIPA standards to create a pattern catalogue. Naturally, interactions of each interaction pattern add new tasks to the participant agents. We believe that the requirements of these new tasks and how they are inserted into the agent’s internal architecture must be documented as part of the pattern knowledge. Thus, internal requirements of the “ontology inception” pattern are discussed from the perspective of the participating agents. By this way, understandability of the pattern will be improved.