Agent Usage Patterns: Bridging the Conceptual Gap between Agent-based Applications and Middleware

We present a concept for facilitating the development of agent applications called agent usage patterns. These patterns are meant to bridge the conceptual gap that currently exists between the programmer and agent-based middleware systems. We analyze each pattern's potential for improving performance, reliability, and security. Finally, we describe some preliminary experiments: we present a stock-trading distributed application whose agent-based implementation results in reduced communication delay.