Systems, Man & Cybernetics - July 2015 - 33

◆ In E-CARGO, objects and agents are clearly clarified

◆

◆
◆

◆

as different entities in collaboration, i.e., agents are
role-players, but objects are not.
The E-CARGO model provides more reusable components by its formalized definitions other than concepts
in other approaches.
With the E-CARGO model, many real-world problems
can be discovered and formalized, and then computerbased solutions can be specified or provided.
RBC provides a computational discovering methodology for a variety of industry problems.
RBC provides new visions into collaboration and
assists collaboration technologies to be applied into
other areas.
RBC introduces a new viewpoint of collaboration, i.e.,
collectivism that emphasizes team effort/performance
rather than traditional individualism.

Conclusions and Future Work
RBC is a well-specified methodology that mainly uses
roles as underlying components to facilitate collaboration activities. Its fundamental E-CARGO model is
abstract and can be extended and instantiated in different ways to discover challenges and, furthermore, to
investigate effective solutions. It is valuable to extend
research and investigations on RBC and E-CARGO to
promote the analysis, design, and development of collaboration systems.
Future work can be conducted along different directions by overlapping with other research fields and by
scrutinizing each step in the life cycle of RBC and each
component of E-CARGO, and the examples are as follows.
◆ Role negotiation is the initial step in the life cycle of RBC.
It has not yet been investigated deeply and thoroughly.
◆ When should we conduct role transfer during collaboration? This is another challenge for researchers to put
effort into theories and practice.
◆ Goal setting is a problem discussed significantly in
MASs and intelligent systems. However, from the viewpoint of RBC, how to set up a goal for a group needs
to be clarified. Solving this problem will innovate the
way to conduct collaboration, the design of MASs, and
distributed systems. More implementations or simulations are needed to verify that roles can be considered
the dynamics of a system [64].
◆ Introducing role mechanisms into popular programming languages [27] is also an interesting field for
researchers and programmers to investigate.
◆ RBC and E-CARGO can be used to solve the real-world
problems related to teams [9], [55], interactions [10],
[37], [44], and production [46]. RBC has wide and promising applications in industry [50]-[55].

About the Author
Haibin Zhu (haibinz@nipissingu.ca) earned his B.S.
degree in computer engineering from the Institute of
Engineering and Technology, Zhengzhou, China, in 1983
and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from
the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT),
Changsha, China, in 1988 and 1997, respectively. He is a
full professor in the Department of Computer Science and
Mathematics and the founder and director of the Collaborative Systems Laboratory, Nipissing University, Canada,
and a visiting professor in the Department of Control Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, China. He was
previously a visiting professor and a special lecturer in the
College of Computing Sciences, New Jersey Institute of
Technology, Newark, and a lecturer, an associate professor, and a full professor at NUDT. He has published more
than 140 research papers, five books, and four book chapters on object-oriented programming, distributed systems, collaborative systems, and computer architecture.
He is serving or has served as a cochair of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society Technical Committee
on Distributed Intelligent Systems; an associate editor
for IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Magazine;
an associate editor for International Journal of Agent
Technologies and Systems; an associate editor-in-chief
for International Journal of Advances in Information
and Service Sciences; a managing editor of International
Journal of Electrical, Electronics, & Computing Technology and Computer Sciences; a member of the editorial board of International Journal of Software Science
and Computational Intelligence; a guest editor for IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (A); an
organizer of the workshops and special sessions on rolebased collaboration (RBC) for more than ten international
conferences; and a program committee member for more
than 50 international conferences. He is a member of the
Association for Computing Machinery; a life member
of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology,
United States; and a Senior Member of the IEEE.
References
[1] E. Alonso, D. Kudenko, and D. Kazakov, Eds., Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent
Systems (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 2636). Berlin, Germany:
Springer-Verlag, 2003.
[2] M. Armbrust, A. Fox, R. Griffith, A. D. Joseph, R. Katz, A. Konwinski, G. Lee, D.
Patterson, A. Rabkin, I. Stoica, and M. Zaharia, "A view of cloud computing," Commun.
ACM, vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 50-58, Apr. 2010.
[3] A. O. Al-Zaghameem and M. Alfraheed, "An expressive role-based approach for
improving distributed collaboration transparency," Int. Comput. Sci. Issues, vol. 10,
nos. 4-2, pp. 61-67, July 2013.
[4] G. Cabri, "Environment-supported roles to develop complex systems," in Engineering Environment-Mediated Multi-Agent Systems (Lecture Notes in Computer
Science, vol. 5049), D. Weyns, S. A. Brueckner, and Y. Demazeau, Eds. Berlin, Germany:

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mike Brewes of Nipissing University for his
assistance in proofreading this article.

Springer-Verlag, 2008, pp. 284-295.
[5] G. Cabri, "Agent roles for context-aware P2P systems," in Agents and Peerto-Peer Computing (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6573), S. Joseph, Z.

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