Role agent pattern: a developer guideline

Agents are an emerging technology that grants programmers a new way to exploit distributed resources. One of the hardest difficult in the development of this kind of application is the managing of agent interactions, since agents must interact in a collaborative and/or competitive way to achieve their task. Roles are a powerful paradigm that can be used to model agent interactions, both between two (or more agents and between an agent and the platform/node on which it is running. The concept of role has already been used as an extension of the object oriented programming, but this is not perfectly suitable to the agent’s paradigm. In this paper we propose a guideline to role developing and use, with regard to the agent technology. In particular we focus on the main problems that a role system and a role developer must take into account.