Special Issue: Coordination Models and Systems

CONCURRENCY AND COMPUTATION: PRACTICE AND EXPERIENCE Concurrency Computat.: Pract. Exper. 2006; 18:357 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/cpe.942

Special Issue: Coordination Models and Systems

In recent years, research in coordination has become part of all fields in computer science. The proliferation of distributed computing, mobile computation, and especially the ubiquity of the Internet has made coordination one of the key areas in modern computing. Coordination is a multidisciplinary topic related to almost every aspect of computer science—from information security to mobile computation, from artificial intelligence to wireless communication, it is difficult to find a computer science field in which coordination does not play a central role. The idea of coordination consists of managing the dependencies between distributed parts of a system (e.g. agents, processes, processors). Solutions for this problem range from ad hoc to biologically inspired approaches. In general, researchers agree on the notion that a coordination model or infrastructure works as the main medium used by the distributed parts of a system. The papers in this special issue are improved and extended versions of the best papers presented at the Coordination Track of the 2004 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, which was held in Nicosia, Cyprus on 14–17 March 2004. These five articles were chosen from an original pool of 27 papers from 18 different countries. The papers were extensively peer-reviewed in a process that involved more than 70 researchers. Subsequently, the extended versions of selected papers were rereviewed by renowned experts in the field so as to ensure journal quality. The five papers represent the wide spectrum of the coordination field. Ossowski and Menezes present an overview of techniques for handling the challenges of open systems. They discuss how the solutions for distributed systems and multi-agent systems are converging into a novel approach to coordination called emergent coordination. Belmonte et al. look at robustness and tolerance to agent misbehaviors in the context of self-interested agents that coordinate their action by forming coalitions. Di Stefano et al. propose an approach allowing a separate design and implementation of behavior and interaction aspects for a multi-agent application. Rossi’s work introduces the X-Folders software environment for coordinating workflow processes. Mamei and Zambonelli explore the field of network and environment dynamism by describing a suitable programming model for allowing tuple propagation and self-maintenance; this is one example of emergent coordination. S ASCHA O SSOWSKI Universidad Rey Juan Carlos RONALDO M ENEZES Florida Institute of Technology

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