Designing a Coordination Model for Open Systems

Coordination models for closed concurrent systems like Linda and Gamma have been well established during the last few years. Closed systems typically are planned ahead and consist only of active components the behaviour of which is known in advance. In contrast, open systems are inherently heterogeneous and dynamically change their con-guration over time. Models for coordinating software agents in open systems must therefore be able to cope with constantly changing conng-urations and new, unknown kinds of agents. In this paper, we identify the requirements of open systems with respect to coordination models and develop a coordination model suitable for these purposes.