Facilitator Agent Design Pattern of Procurement Business Systems

Agents and design patterns are commonly used to support component-based software development (CBSD). They provide schemes for refining subsystems and agent components. Since software agents are considered as advanced technology abstractions of objects and component design, new design patterns need to be developed for software agents to support e-business systems. Design patterns are a new methodology used to support other systems such as realtime systems and knowledge management systems. However, there are still insufficient schemas established to support e- business and the B2B, B2C, and C2C paradigms. Design patterns help both designers and developers to integrate their ideas and experiences into better formulations for software system architectures. We put our effort to establishing a new agent-based design pattern that we call a "facilitator design pattern" (FDP). This design pattern uses the "master-slave" design pattern for mobile agents with a static agent called facilitator agent. The design is used to improve the B2C e-market place in e- business scenarios.