Agent Software Engineering with Role Modelling

Due to their autonomy and social behavior, agents will play important roles in future emerging enterprises. They will fill key positions and provide essential capabilities. We propose role modelling as a software engineering technique for specifying, analyzing, and designing systems on the basis of the roles that the agents will play. Our approach builds on our earlier research in patterns [4], [5] of agent systems. Object-oriented role models can be extended to represent patterns of agent interaction that can then be employed to engineer agent systems.