RIO: Roles, interactions and organizations

Abstract

The notions of role and organization have often been emphasized in several agent oriented methodologies. Sadly, the notion of interaction has seldom been reified in these methodologies. We define here a model of runnable specification of interaction protocols. Then, we propose a methodology for the design of open multi-agent systems based on an engineering of interaction protocols. These interaction protocols are described in term of conversation between micro-roles characterized by their skills, then micro-roles are gathered in composite roles. Then, composite roles are used to build abstract agents. Lastly, these latter can be distributed on running agents of a multi-agent system.