Design Patterns for Self-Organizing Multiagent Systems

Natural systems are currently being regarded as rich sources of inspiration for engineering artificial systems, particularly when adopting the multiagent system (MAS) paradigm. To promote a systematic reuse of mechanisms featured in self-organizing systems, we analyse a selected list of design patterns for recurrent problems in the literature. Starting from our reference MAS metamodel, we provide a complete characterization of each pattern according to a reference scheme: in particular we describe the problem, the solution with respect to our metamodel, the natural systems which have inspired the pattern and known applications. Furthermore, to contextualize the patterns within an engineering workflow, we briefly describe our methodological approach for designing self-organizing MAS.