ROLES IN MAS Managing the Complexity of Tasks and Environments

Roles have been used both as an intuitive concept in order to analyze multi-agent systems and model inter-agent social activity as well as a formal structure in order to implement coherent and robust teams. The extensive use of roles in implemented systems evidences their importance in multi-agent systems design and implementation. In this paper we emphasize the importance of roles for multi-agent systems to act in complex domains, identify some of their properties and we review work done concerning specification and exploitation of roles in agent-oriented system engineering methodologies, in formal models about agent social activity, and in multi-agent systems that are deployed in dynamic and unpredictable domains.

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