Role-Based Collaboration (RBC) is a computational methodology that uses roles as the primary underlying mechanism to facilitate collaboration activities. It consists of a set of concepts, principles, models, processes, and algorithms.

RBC and its Environments - Classes, Agents, Roles, Groups, and Objects (E-CARGO) model have been developed to a powerful tool for investigating collaboration and complex systems. Related research has brought and will bring in exciting improvements to the development, evaluation, and management of systems including collaboration, services, clouds, productions, and administration systems. RBC and E-CARGO grow gradually into a strong fundamental methodology and model for exploring solutions to problems of complex systems including Collective Intelligence, Sensor Networking, Scheduling, Smart Cities, Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Social Simulation Systems.

Different from most modeling technologies discussed in the modeling community, E-CARGO is not a programming language. E-CARGO assists scientists and engineering to formalize abstract problems, which originally are taken as complex problems, and finally points out solutions to such problems including programming. Developing E-CARGO into a programming language is a long-term goal.

The E-CARGO model possesses all the preferred properties of a computational model. It has been verified by formalizing and solving significant problems in collaboration and complex systems, e.g., Group Role Assignment (GRA). With the help of E-CARGO, the methodology of RBC can be applied to solving various real-world problems. On the other hand, the details of each E-CARGO component are still open for revisions and renovations for specific fields to make the model easily applied. For example, in programming, we need to specify the primitive elements for each component of E-CARGO. When these primitive elements are well-specified, a new type of programming language can be developed and applied to solving general problems with software design and implementations.

In this tutorial, we examine the requirement of research on collaboration systems and technologies, discuss RBC and its model E-CARGO; review the related research achievements on RBC and E-CARGO in the past years; discuss those problems that have not yet been solved satisfactorily; present the fundamental methods to conduct research related to RBC and E-CRAGO and discover related problems; and analyze their connections with other cutting-edge fields. This tutorial aims at informing the research community of models that E-CARGO is a well-developed model and has been investigated and applied in many ways. The author welcome queries, reviews, studies, applications, and criticisms about E-CARGO.

As case studies of E-CARGO, GRA and its related problem models are inspired by delving into the details of the E-CARGO components and the RBC process. GRA can help solving related collaboration problems with the help of programming and optimization platforms. All the related Java codes are posted on Github.com: https://github.com/haibinnipissing/E-CARGO-Codes. The author welcomes interested researchers and practitioners to use these codes in their research and practice and contact the author if there are any questions about them.

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