Introducing Mobility into Agent Coordination Patterns

This paper proposes coordination patterns that support matchmaking, communication and interaction among mobile agents in addition to stationary ones. Mobile agent technology is a powerful implementation technique of distributed systems, but we need to manage migrations of agents, including their current and destination locations. The proposed patterns enable us to define coordination between mobile agents or between mobile and stationary agents without explicitly knowing their migrations between locations. They are mostly based on the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language, one of the most extended Agent Communication Languages, but also new patterns are proposed. Additionally, a case of study about tourism is presented.