Coordination of collaborative activities: a framework for the definition of tasks interdependencies

The coordination of interdependencies between tasks in collaborative environments is a very important and difficult endeavour. The separation between tasks and interdependencies allows for the use of different coordination policies in the same collaborative environment by changing only the coordination mechanisms that control the interdependencies. This paper presents a framework for the definition of interdependencies that frequently occur in collaborative activities. By means of a clear characterization of interdependencies, it is possible to identify coordination mechanisms to manage them, opening the way toward a powerful coordination tool capable of encompassing a wide range of collaborative applications. An implementation of the coordination model of a collaborative virtual environment based on the proposed framework is given as example.