Patterns for Cooperation

Abstract

Collaborating autonomous agents are becoming increasingly attractive for systems where problem solving and decision making must be distributed. Unfortunately, they are not yet practical for industrial application. Selected aspects of agent theory, however, can be very useful to software development. In this paper, we give three patterns which can form a base for this. The patterns are the result of a process improvement project for the textile industry, which we will use as an example. INTRODUCTION In recent years, the field of autonomous collaborating agents have received increased interest. This is due to some fundamental requirements encountered in industrial systems which are difficult to meet using traditional centralized control architectures; the most significant being robustness, scalability, reconfigurability, and reusability. Furthermore, industrial applications are usually complex, and complexity demands decomposition. The term "agent" is currently used in many different wa..