What Do You Mean, Coordination?∗

Coordination models and languages represent a new approach to design and development of concurrent systems. The interest in coordination has intensified in the last few years, as evidenced by the increasing number of conferences, tracks, and papers devoted to this topic, and by the recent upsurge of research activity in the theoretical computer science community in this field. The field is relatively new, and while many coordination models and languages form a tight cluster of very similar variants, some others are drastically different and they appear to have nothing in common with each other. All this makes it difficult for the uninitiated to discern the underlying similarities of various approaches to coordination. This paper is an “easy reader” introduction to coordination models and languages, their common aims and purpose, their relevance, and their place in the computing arena. The work on coordination at CWI is presented here as a specific example.