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”, thus besides software-software we have software-human interactions to handle, too. Also, a number of peculiarities and related engineering challenges makes 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 engineer- ing 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.