Coordination of large-scale socio-technical systems: Challenges and research directions

Most of the emerging software-intensive systems nowadays are very large-scale ones, and inherently socio-technical. In this position paper, we argue that the peculiar features of such emerging systems (up to millions of interacting components, lacking central control, mixing humans and artificial components) call for novel approaches to coordinate the overall activities and functionalities. Accordingly, we discuss the key challenges to be faced by research in coordination models and technologies, and try to sketch some promising research directions.