Design of collaborative information agents

Effective development of nontrivial systems of collaborative information agents requires that an in-depth analysis is made resulting in (1) specification of requirements at different levels of the system, (2) specification of design structures, and (3) a systematic verification. To support a widespread use of intelligent information agents for the Internet, the challenges are (1) to identify and classify a variety of instances of the different types of reusable (requirement, design and proof) patterns, (2) build libraries of them, and (3) provide corresponding easy-to-use plug-in information agent components to the common user. In a simplified example it is shown which types of reusable requirements patterns, design patterns, and proof patterns can be exploited, and how these patterns relate to each other.