Awareness-based Collaboration Driving Process-based Coordination

Abstract

Awareness-enabled coordination (AEC) is a platform designed to address the problem of scaling collaboration to large multi-organizational teams. Such collaboration is inhibited by the complexity in multi-organizational environments and lack of efficiency in achieving team objectives. AEC provides a contextualization mechanism that deals with such complex, real world environments where teams involve humans, tools, software services, and agents that come from different organizations, are subject to multiple jurisdictions, and provide diverse expertise. To provide efficiency in achieving team objectives, AEC provides situation- and project-related awareness, as well as process-based coordination and automation. We describe the AEC architecture and discuss AEC models and mechanisms for computing awareness and coordinating action. We use examples from the homeland security domain to illustrate these AEC technical capabilities and their benefits