* The views expressed in this paper are personal. Most outsiders tend to base their analysis of the future of the Eurosystem on the shape of the Federal Reserve System in the US. This paper argues that the US model is inappropriate. It suggests that the Eurosystem is pursuing a different arrangement, where the balance of power in the national central banks rather than in the centre may continue...

This paper presents a holonic co-ordination server which is made up of a recursive hierarchy of three different agent types: On the top stands an agent providing matchmaking services and representing the co-ordination server to the outside. It passes incoming requests to a subordinated agent type that is equipped with co-ordination mechanisms such as auctions, negotiations and coalition formati...

This paper addresses the problem of division of labour as an evolutionary process in which co-ordinated agents attempt problem-solving as a search in problem space. Co-ordination stress and learning trigger adaptation but as complexity rises radical solutions are sought prompting radical organisational as well as technological change. The analytical issues involved are further explored by resor...

Co-ordination is one of the central research issues in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Most of the efforts in designing co-ordination mechanisms set out from an agent-centred point of view: they see the individual actor with its local beliefs and reasoning capabilities as the foundation of all system properties. Our thesis is that co-ordination is best modelled from an environment-centred,...

In this paper, a coordination method to solve task allocation problems in manufacturing system is proposed. inspired by the ability of the ants to establish the shortest route from their nests to the food source and back, researchers found out that these ants secrete a substance called ‘pheromone’ and use its trails as a medium for communicating information among each other. The pheromone-based...

In this paper we report on the investigation, description and analysis of communication and co-ordination practices in software engineering projects. We argue that existing models of the software process do not adequately address the situated, day-to-day practices in which software engineers collectively engage, yet it is through these practices that effective co-ordination is achieved. Drawing...

A key problem for models of dialogue is to explain how semantic co-ordination is achieved. The collaborative model highlights pair-specfic co-ordination processes. The interactive alignment model emphasises priming processes. We report a ‘Maze-task’ experiment that investigates the effects of: a) apparent origin of an utterance (primary vs. peripheral participants) and b) prior exposure (primin...

A key problem for models of dialogue is to explain how semantic co-ordination in dialogue is achieved and sustained. This paper presents findings from a series of Maze Task experiments which are not readily explained by the primary co-ordination mechanisms of existing models. It demonstrates that alignment in dialogue is not simply an outcome of successful interaction, but a communicative resou...