Towards a taxonomy of adaptive agent-based collaboration patterns for autonomic service ensembles

Services are increasingly becoming the building block of today's distributed systems. However, to support the development of robust complex applications made up of ensembles of cooperating service components and to promote autonomic features, adaptive collaboration patterns among components have to be enforced. In this paper, we introduce a taxonomy of adaptive agent-based collaboration patterns, for their analysis and exploitation in the area of autonomic service ensembles. The preliminary proposed taxonomy has two main advantages: (i) it enables the reuse of existing experience from the agents' world in the area of autonomic service systems, and (ii) it can provide useful suggestions to designer for the choice of the most suitable patterns.