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The development of agent-based systems must take into account interactions, carefully modelling and engineering them. Roles represent a good concept that can help designers and developers dealing with interactions. So far, several role approaches for agents have been proposed. This paper presents a survey on the most important existing approaches. This survey evaluates the above approaches presenting their main characteristics and comparing them each other to find out how they provide support for analysis, design, implementation, interoperability and openness. Also the support for a formal notation is evaluated. This survey does not try to find out the best role approach, but to expose to designers and developers advantages and drawbacks of several approaches, so that they can recognize the conditions under which their use is preferable rather than others.