COORDINATION IN CE SYSTEMS - AN APPROACH BASED ON THE MANAGEMENT OF DEPENDENCES BETWEEN ACTIVITIES

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 genera l model for coordination which can be adapted for some situations in t he context of CE. For this purpose, the coordination definition develo ped by Malone [25] has been adopted. Coordination is then defined as t he process of managing dependencies between activities. In this contex t, a theoretical model is presented that allows one to determine how t o model an agent's activities and how to detect dependencies between t hose activities. In our model, major concepts are developed in terms o f components of coordination, situations of coordination, coordination mechanisms and the coordination process. In this paper, we detail thi s model and then, we present an illustrative example and finally, we i dentify the current status and the future evolution of our approach.