Description templates for agent-oriented patterns

A number of agent-oriented patterns have been proposed to share agent-oriented software engineering experiences. However, most of the existing descriptions of these patterns are incomprehensive or inconsistent with descriptions of similar patterns by other authors. We seek to improve the communication and comprehension of agent-oriented patterns by improving their descriptions. This paper presents a pattern template structure for defining agent-oriented pattern templates. We used the template structure to define eight agent-oriented pattern templates. We describe the elements of these eight templates. We illustrate the expressiveness of these templates by using three of them to describe three existing agent-oriented patterns.