Role agent pattern: a developer guideline

Agents are an emerging technology that grants programmers a new way to exploit distributed resources. One of the hardest difficult in the development of this kind of application is the managing of agent interactions, since agents must interact in a collaborative and/or competitive way to achieve their task. Roles are a powerful paradigm that can be used to model agent interactions, both between two (or more) agents and between an agent and the platform/node on which it is running. In this paper we propose a guideline to role developing and use, with regard to the agent technology. In particular we focus on the main problems that a role system and a role developer must take into account.