WhiteCat: Making agent roles perceivable

Summary form only given. Agents are social and autonomous entities that can take great advantages of interaction modelling. Role-Based Collaboration (RBC)[4] is an emerging methodology to facilitate an organizational structure, provide orderly system behavior, and consolidate system security for both human and non-human entities that collaborate and coordinate their activities with or within systems. Interaction management must, however, be able to handle run-time and dynamic scenarios. Hence every RBC system must provide a good level of dynamism, that is providing the capability of an agent to assume, use and release a role depending on run-time conditions. In Object Oriented Programming languages, such as Java, role perceivability could be achieved with appropriate changes to the agent/entity class structure, but this requires compile-time constraints that are, in their nature, not dynamic. Moreover, other issues raise in the case when the agent is masked by a proxy or some other indirection level, since in this case it is difficult to perceive the played role because the agent is hidden. This poster proposes an approach (WhiteCat) to remedy the above problems: maintaining an appropriate level of dynamism. The work presented here allows a Java agent to make its role perceivable to other entities as if it is applied at compile-time. The presented approach was born in the agent scenario, but thanks to its modularity and flexibility it can be exploited and applied to other dynamic contexts.