Many approaches to agent collaboration have been introduced in military war-games, and those approaches address
methods for actor- (agent-) collaboration within a team to achieve given goals, where the team’s abstract mission is
translated into concrete tasks for each actor. To meet fast-changing battlefield situations, an actor must be 1) loosely
coupled with their tasks and be 2) able to take over the role of other actors if necessary to reflect role handovers
occurring in real combat. Achieving these requirements allows the transfer of tasks assigned one actor to another
actor in circumstances when that actor cannot execute its assigned role, such as when destroyed in action. Tight
coupling between an actor and its tasks can prevent role handover in fast-changing situations. Unfortunately,
existing approaches and war-game software strictly assign tasks to actors during design, therefore they prevent the
loose coupling needed for successful role handover. To overcome these shortcomings, we have defined Role-based
Command Hierarchy (ROCH) model that dynamically assigns roles to actors based on their situation at runtime. In
the model we devise “Role� to separate actors from their tasks. Described in this paper, we implement the ROCH
model as a component that uses a publish-subscribe pattern to handle the link between an actor and the roles of its
subordinates (other actors in the team). Therefore, an actor can indirectly send a message (order or report) to another
actor without knowing which actor is recipient. The sender actor is only required to know the relevant roles. The
model has been implemented and tested in a military project, and we briefly show the outcomes in this paper.