PRODUCT DESIGN PATTERNS FOR AGENT-BASED MODELING

Since they were first introduced by architect Christopher Alexander in his classic book The Timeless Way of Building, design patterns have offered a powerful yet simple way to conceptualize and communicate designs in many disciplines. Design patterns became widely used for software development by the 1990's. These software design patterns have subsequently been shown to be of great value in improving the reliability and reducing the cost of software. Given that virtually all large-scale agent-based models are ultimately implemented in software, there is great potential for software design patterns to improve the practice of agent-based modeling. Several authors have discussed the use of patterns for agent-based modeling or agent-oriented software. This paper's contribution is that it provides an extensive set of both existing and new agent-based modeling design patterns, each of which is substantiated with at least three successful published example uses in models or modeling platforms.