Agent Roles for Context-Aware P2P Systems

Roles represent a useful concept that has been successfully exploited to design and manage agent interactions in a context-aware fashion. For instance, they can be made available by a local context with specific features, or they can be exploited to enforce local policies while keeping general mechanisms.Moreover, one of the most important recognized advantage is that they allow a separation of concerns between algorithmic and interaction issues, simplifying the job of the developers of systems.In this paper we propose to apply roles in the field of P2P systems, explaining which the related advantages and the issues to be faced are. We will also present an infrastructure, RoleX, which was conceived for agents' roles but can be adapted to P2P scenarios to accomplish this task.