Design patterns for swarms engineered with context-role-oriented modeling

Abstract Ensembles and swarms occur everywhere in nature, in social and technical contexts. Their modeling and programming form a significant challenge in modern software systems engineering. While it is well-known how self-adaptive or autonomic systems can be designed advantageously, the effective modeling and programming of ensembles often require the engineering of new software languages, which necessitates a tremendous development effort. This paper presents a context-role-oriented approach for modeling the structure and behavior of ensembles. We contribute three design patterns for frequently occurring ensemble types, developed via context-role-oriented modeling. Additionally, we show the feasibility of nesting design patterns to describe the behavior of nested swarms.