Roles in Coordination and in Agent Deliberation: A Merger of Concepts

In this paper we generalize and merge two models of roles
used in multiagent systems which address complementary aspects: enacting
roles and communication among roles in an organization or institution.
We do this by proposing a metamodel of roles and specializing
the metamodel to fit two existing models. We show how the two approaches
can be integrated since they deal with complementary aspects:
[1] focuses on roles as a way to specify interactions among agents, and,
thus, it emphasizes the public character of roles. [2] focuses instead on
how roles are played, and thus it emphasizes the private aspects of roles:
how the beliefs and goals of the roles become the beliefs and goals of the
agents. The former approach focuses on the dynamics of roles in function
of the communication process. The latter approach focuses on the
internal dynamics of the agents when they start playing a role or shift
the role they are currently playing.