Coordination of complex socio-technical systems: Challenges and opportunities

The issue of coordination in Socio-Technical Systems (STS) mostly stems from “humans-in-the-loop”: besides software-software we have software-human interactions to handle, too. Also, a number of peculiarities and related engineering challenges make a socio-technical gap easy to rise, in the form of a gap between what the computational platform provides, and what the users are expecting to have. In this paper we try to shed some light on the issue of engineering coordination mechanisms and policies in STS. Accordingly, we highlight the main challenges, the opportunities we have to deal with them, and a few selected approaches for specific STS application domains.