Design Patterns for Multi-agent Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Design patterns document a field’s systematic knowledge derived from experiences. Despite the vast body of work in the field of multi-agent systems (MAS), design patterns for MAS are not popular among software practitioners. As MAS have features that are widely considered as key to engineering complex distributed applications, it is important to provide a clear overview of existing patterns to make this knowledge accessible. To that end, we performed a systematic literature review (SLR) covering the main publication venues of the field since 1998, resulting in 206 patterns. The study shows that (1) there is a lack of a standard template for documenting design patterns for MAS, which hampers the use of patterns by practitioners, (2) associations between patterns are poorly described, which results in a lack of overview of the pattern space, (3) patterns for MAS have been used for a variety of application domains, which underpins their high potential for practitioners, and (4) classifications of design patterns for MAS are bounded to specific pattern catalogs, a more holistic view on the pattern space is missing. From our study, we outline a number of guidelines that are important for future work on design patterns for MAS and their adoption in practice.