Modeling Role-based Interactions for Agents

Software agents, thanks to their autonomy in carrying out tasks, are fruitfully exploited in large-scale distributed environments, such as the Internet. In such a scenario, interactions among agents are an issue that must be faced in an appropriate way. This paper proposes an interaction model based on roles, being a role a set of capabilities and an expected behavior. Modeling interactions by roles can simplify the design of the agent-based applications. A notation based on XML is adopted to support the definition and the exploitation of roles at different phases of the application development. Finally, an application example shows the effectiveness of the approach.