Engineering infrastructures for mobile organizations

Mobile application components can be effectively and uniformly modeled in terms of autonomous agents moving across different contexts during execution. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the definition of programmable organizational contexts, which can promote an engineered approach to application design and that, if is supported by a proper programmable coordination infrastructure, can make applications more modular and easy to maintain. On this base, the paper analyses several issues related to the implementation of programmable coordination infrastructures for mobility. In addition, the paper introduces a preliminary proposal for the modeling of programmable coordination infrastructures in terms of a general-purpose event-based infrastructure. Finally, the paper sketches open issues and promising research directions.