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.