Temporal aspects of dynamic role assignment

A helpful abstraction of a group of agents is a set of interacting roles, or sets of normative behaviors, that the agents can assume. An important characteristic of real-world agent systems is that the roles played by an agent may change over time. These changes can be of several different kinds. We describe an illustrative application where such role changes are important, analyze and classify the various kinds of role changes over time that may occur, and show how this analysis is useful in developing a more formal description of the application.