Lifecycle of Adaptive Agreements: A Pattern Language

摘要

Adapti veness can be considered as one of the most relevant features of complex distributed systems in general and Agreement Technologies (AT) in particular. In an agent-based, service-oriented and organisation-centric framework such as AT, a critical challenge is the definition of new organisations "on the fly", reacting to changes in the environment. This paper proposes a specific lifecycle for mutable agents in AT, which begins with a preliminary structure named initiative and ends up with a full-fledged organisation. This lifecycle is supported by elementary pieces (changents and shifter agents) and predefined templates, structured in the form of patterns. These adaptation patterns compose a pattern language, which defines the stages of the adaptive lifecycle. We present this pattern language and provide some specific examples. We also illustrate the usefulness of this approach by extending an existing AT-based application in the field of mHealth (mobile-Health) with additional adaptive capabilities.