A Patterns System to Coordinate Mobile Collaborative Applications

Abstract

Advances in wireless communication technologies and mobile computing devices open new possibilities to carry out computer-supported mobile collaborative work. However this opportunity brings also a number of challenges to designers, since collaborative applications supporting mobile activities involve requirements which are not present in stationary collaboration scenarios. For example, mobile collaborative applications should not use centralized components because it jeopardizes the autonomy required by mobile workers. In order to help designers to deal with these new requirements, this article presents a patterns system focused on the coordination support required for mobile collaborative work. Such patterns represent reusable designs that help reduce design risks, cost and time. The article also presents three mobile collaborative applications in which proposed patterns were included in their respective designs.

Towards a reference architecture for the design of mobile shared workspaces

“…The development of these applications, however, can be a significant challenge and to our knowledge no previous research has been made to integrate this design knowledge to ease the development of tools aimed at supporting particular loosely coupled activities [27].…”

“…Unfortunately, they do not describe the design of strategies used to support loosely coupled work [27]. Thus, the potential design solutions behind such applications cannot be reused in future developments.…”

“…Others focus on the communication or coordination support required to carry out loosely coupled work [27,33]. However, these papers do not report on the design decisions required by the MSW to support loosely coupled (or multi-synchronous) work.…”

“…Some of those communication and coordination patterns have been proposed by the authors in previous works [27,33].…”

A Self-Adaptive Multi-Agent System Approach for Collaborative Mobile Learning

“…Mobile software applications often take into consideration ideal cases of execution, based on a set of correctness assumptions. However, this view is not aligned with real environment deployment, where scenarios found at runtime do not comply with the assumptions taken during design and implementation [13], [17]. Outside the classroom settings, the environment induces several uncertainties itself.…”