Roles in Collaborative Activity

Cooperative activity involves collaboration and communication. Through the stages of collaboration, agents may play different roles either for performing domain tasks, or for forming decisions concerning the collaborative activity itself. Collaboration and communication can be enhanced if dependencies between agents’ intentions are captured. Role-specification is expected to be a vital factor towards this goal. This is evidenced by roles’ importance in many implemented systems. Agents’ coordination, plan monitoring and re-planning in these systems rely on contextual information and agents’ roles. However, there is not an implemented generic agent architecture that realizes the importance of roles for flexible cooperative activity. This paper shows how the ICagent development framework has been evolved to support cooperative activity through representing and reasoning about multi-role recipes.