The Role of Roles

Agent-based systems are no longer contained within the boundaries of a single, small agent organization. To meet the demands of large-scale system implementations, agent organizations must deal with environmental forces, interact with other agent organizations, and know how they affect individual agents. In this paper, we look to social and organizational systems theory as a source of inspiration. Many of these techniques have been successful for a hundreds and thousands of years. We believe that the designers of agent-based systems can learn a great deal from organization designers. This paper examines the notion of role and its implications on how agents might behave in group settings.