This award supports research into the definition and development of a pattern language and pattern book for multi-agent systems, and the development of formal social structures and generalized social software artifacts for agent-based systems. The artifacts implementing the social structures are software-embodied entities existing separately from the intelligent agents that interact with them. Coordination and control tasks are divided between agents and the social artifacts with which they interact. This division of labor allows the use of coordination mechanisms designed to control the combinatorial explosions of coordination costs that are expected in systems with large numbers of agents. It also enables explicit control of emergent social behavior in agent-based systems. The pattern language will improve expertise transfer between developers and researchers in intelligent agent systems, and the social structures and artifacts will allow creation of coordination algorithms scalable to systems with large numbers of agents. www.eas.asu.edu/~gcss/
