Environment-Based Coordination Through Coordination Artifacts

In the context of human organisations, environment plays a fundamental role for supporting cooperative work and, more generally, complex coordination activities. Support is realised through services, tools, artifacts shared and exploited by the collectivity of individuals for achieving individual as well as global objectives. The conceptual framework of coordination artifacts is meant to bring the same sort of approach to multiagent systems (MAS). Coordination artifacts are the entities used to instrument the environment so as to fruitfully support cooperative and social activities of agent ensembles. Here, infrastructures play a key role by providing services for artifact use and management. In this work we describe this framework, by defining a model for the coordination artifact abstraction, and discussing the infrastructures and technologies currently available for engineering MAS application with coordination artifacts.