Changing Roles: Dynamic Role Assignment.
James Odell, H. Van Dyke Parunak, Sven Brueckner, John Sauter · The Journal of Object Technology · 2003
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.1 Several possible implementation techniques exist for implementing programs that support social entities possessing multiple and changeable class-based roles, including class inheritance and aggregation.In this paper, we will not discuss program-level implementation options for treating role as a class.Instead, our emphasis will by at the analysis-level (i.e., a conceptual and implementation-independent approach).