Role Models — Patterns of Agent System Analysis and Design

Due to their autonomy and social behaviour, agents will play important roles in emerging enterprises; they will fill key positions and provide essential capabilities. This paper describes role modelling as a software engineering technique for specifying, analysing, and designing systems on the basis of the roles that the agents will play. This paper builds on our earlier research in patterns of agent systems. A pattern is a useful solution to a reoccurring problem in a particular context; patterns can be used to solve software engineering problems in analysis, design, and implementation. This paper explains how object-oriented role models can be extended to represent patterns of agent interaction that can then be employed to engineer agent systems. Role theory deals with collaboration and co-ordination. Roles have also been applied to distributed systems management, and to agent and robot systems. However, there has to date not been a methodology for realising these representations in an automated or semi-automated system, due to the lack of adequate formalism and corresponding abstractions in software. Role models rectify this situation for software analysis, design, and implementation.