A Framework for Design Patterns in Tropos

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) architectures are gaining popularity over traditional ones for building open, distributed, and evolving software. Since the fundamental concepts of multi-agent systems are social and intentional rather than object, functional, or implementation-oriented, the design of MAS architectures should be eased by using what we call social patterns rather than object-oriented design patterns. Social patterns are idioms inspired by social and intentional characteristics used to design the details of a system architecture. The paper presents a framework called SKwyRL used to gain insight into social patterns and help design a MAS architecture in terms of these new idioms. The framework is integrated in the Tropos agent methodology. It is developed according to the five modeling dimensions provided by Tropos: social, intentional, structural, communicational, and dynamic. We consider the Broker social pattern as a combination of patterns and use it to illustrate the modeling dimensions of SKwyRL. A framework for code generation is also presented as well as an e-business broker module.