Towards A Role-Based Framework in Agent Teams

Teamwork has become increasingly important in many disciplines. However, existing agent teamwork systems are short of expressivity of flexible and efficient mental states underlying teamwork. This paper models and analyzes three foundation concepts towards role-based teamwork modeling: position, role and role variable. An important characteristic of our notion of role is that it includes the specific operations that an agent filling the role must perform in a specific setting as well as their ordering constraints. Taking this view on role definition will enable us to reason about the assignment of real agents to roles, to talk about the responsibility of roles, to express automated helping behaviors and to achieve a certain level of plan reusability.