Handling Conflicts in Autonomous Coordination of Distributed Collaborative Activities

Abstract

Coordination between different organizations in dynamic situations, such as a disaster response, is challenging. Organizations are autonomous and coordinate the situation from their point of view. There is no central authority to coordinate all operations. To coordinate their actions, organizations need to exchange information on what they are doing. However, they cannot share everything with everybody due to privacy, regulatory or strategic reasons. Currently, only e-mail, telephone or fax are used to exchange information. This makes detecting and handling of conflicting views on the situation very difficult. We propose an approach for inter-organizational process management for these kinds of dynamic scenarios. It allows different organizations to share selected activities by replicating them in the different workspaces of the organizations. State changes of shared activities are propagated optimistically. We explain detecting and handling of two different types of conflicts that can occur in this setting. We provide an implementationand interviews to validate the concepts.