Agents can perform various roles within on IP. e.g., in
contract-net the buyer and seller roles could be played by one
agent, at different times.
A protocol can be defined between different concrete agent
instances or a set of agents satisfying a distinguished role
and/or class. An agent satisfying a distinguished AgentRole and
class is called agent of a given AgentRole and class,
respectively.
An AgentRole is shown as a rectangle that is filled with
some string of one of the following forms:
Seller
role: This
denotes arbitrary agents satisfying the distinguished
AgentRole.
Seller-1/Seller, Buyer
instance / role-1 ... role-n: This denotes a distinguished agent instance
that satisfies the AgentRoles 1-n where n>0.
Seller-1/Seller, Buyer:ComercialAgent
instance / role-1 ... role-n : class: This denotes a distinguished agent
instance that satisfied the AgentRoles 1-n where n>0 and
class it belongs to.