Changing roles: Dynamic role assignment

Abstract

Modeling roles as sets of normative behavior that agents can assume has been found to be a useful development technique. An important characteristic of real-world agent systems is that the roles played by an agent may change over time. These changes can be of several different kinds. We describe an illustrative application where such role changes are important, analyze and classify the various kinds of role changes over time that may occur, and show how this analysis is useful in developing a more formal description of the application.