Towards dynamic assignment of rights and responsibilities to agents (short version)

Abstract

In multi-agent systems (MASs), the concepts of organization and roles provide a useful way to structure the activities of agents and of the system, and thus provide a means to structure the design and engineering of these systems. Accordingly, most frameworks for MASs have some notion of organization such as roles and rights and responsibilities (R&Rs) of agents associated to particular roles. For many applications, the roles, rights and responsibilities of agents may change during the running of the system. In these cases, roles and/or R&Rs need to be assigned to agents dynamically at run-time. In this paper, after describing normative issues of R&Rs, dynamic issues in MAS, the issue of dynamic assignment of R&Rs of roles to agents is discussed. The paper presents the basis for our future work aimed at implementing a middleware tool for such dynamic assignment in MASs. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.