Coordination in CE Systems: An Approach Based on the Management of Dependences between Activities

Abstract

Coordination is a crucial problem in CE systems and it is neither easy to obtain nor to maintain. Our work is an attempt to develop a general model for coordination which can be adapted for some situations in the context of CE. For this purpose, the coordination definition developed by Malone [25] has been adopted. Coordination is then defined as the process of managing dependencies between activities. In this context, a theoretical model is presented that allows one to determine how to model an agent's activities and how to detect dependen cies between those activities. In our model, major concepts are developed in terms of components of coordination, situations of coordina tion, coordination mechanisms and the coordination process. In this paper, we detail this model and then, we present an illustrative example and finally, we identify the current status and the future evolution of our approach.