A Process for Analyzing Agent-Oriented Patterns

Many agent-oriented patterns have been written to capture agentoriented software engineering experiences over the past ten years. However, there is no unified organization of these patterns and their reuse is almost non existent. In this paper, we present a process for analyzing agent-oriented patterns leading towards the creation of a unified view of these patterns. The process is based on the Two Way classification scheme, a classification scheme designed to provide a comprehensive framework for analyzing, classifying and describing agent-oriented patterns. We have investigated almost 100 patterns and classified 28 of them. This paper demonstrates the use of the process to analyze and classify 4 agent-oriented patterns. We also describe an informal exercise involving 6 agent-oriented patterns to gauge the suitability of other researchers using our analysis process for classifying