Collaboration-Driven Role Suggestion for Agents

Thanks to their capabilities of being autonomous, proactive and reactive, software agents are today a powerful paradigm to develop complex systems, which typically involve several interacting agents. In those systems, interactions must be carefully designed and must be smartly managed at run-time. A good paradigm to deal with interaction and run-time situations is represented by the concept of role, which has been exploited in different approaches. In this paper we investigate the adoption of overhearing, a paradigm to deal with cooperating agents, in order to improve the adoption of roles. The approach presented here can be adopted to support the agent decisions regarding the role to assume and its use