Location-oriented coordination in pervasive environments for collaborative work scenariosy

Mobile or pervasive environments are inherently characterised by a high degree of dynamics and frequent changes in the environmental properties. This makes collaborative work of mobile users eminently difficult as the coordination of their work processes needs to adapt steadily to these changing circumstances. As location is one of the most critical changing context dimensions, this adaptive coordination and subsequent re-orientation are mostly based on distinctive temporal and spatial objects (the so-called Schelling points). The contribution of this article is to show the benefit of exploiting the human behaviour of using spatial objects for coordination (which we refer to as location-oriented coordination). We present an approach for which we implemented the location-oriented coordination considerations as a coordination pattern embedded in a coordination architecture, which serves as a runtime environment. By adopting this approach in a representative collaborative work scenario (in the domain of emergency management) and by presenting results from user tests we show its applicability and benefit.