Applying patterns to ITS architectures

Abstract

The concept of patterns has received surprisingly little attention so far from the designers of ITS architectures. This paper is an attempt to bring more light on this important concept and to describe the benefits that patterns can bring to the field of ITSs. The paper concentrates on two issues: a) how to use well-known design patterns from the general field of software design for development of ITSs; and b) the process of discovering patterns in existing ITS architectures. The last part of the paper discusses the benefits of using patterns in ITS architectures and the relation of patterns to some other important design issues of ITSs, like using interoperable software components and ontologies.