Role‐Based Collaboration

RBC is a computational thinking methodology. It is an emerging technology that mainly uses roles as underlying mechanisms to facilitate abstraction, classification, separation of concern, dynamics, and interactions. RBC will find wide applications in different fields, such as, organizations, management systems, systems engineering, and industrial engineering. It is generally relevant to many research and engineering fields including Software engineering, Computer Security, Collaborative Intelligent Systems and Social Psychology (Fig. 1). The goal of special RBC is to improve collaboration among people based on computers. CSCW (Computer-Supported Collaborative Work) systems are computer-based tools that support collaborative activities and should meet the requirements of normal collaboration. They should not only support virtual face-to-face collaborative environment but also improve face-to-face collaboration by providing more mechanisms to overcome the drawbacks of face-to-face collaboration. The extended goal of general RBC is to improve collaborations among objects including humans, systems, and system components. Roles can be used to improve the collaboration methodologies, upgrade the management efficiencies, keep the consistencies of systems, and regulate the behaviors of system components and systems.