Coordination Issues for Distributed Virtual Laboratories

The need to handle increasingly complex application models and to efficiently interpret large volumes of data with adequate user support tools provides the main motivation for distributed virtual environments. Among the existing proposals, there is still a lack of support for the customization of the environment to specific application needs, and the possibility of its dynamic reconfiguration. This may involve the dynamic insertion and removal of components and the modification of certain interaction patterns between components. In the paper we illustrate several requirements for dynamism in distributed virtual environments, in order to convince the reader of the relevance of this issue. This poses the need for coordinating the components of a distributed virtual environment. This aspect is tackled through the concept of a coordination model whose main goals are described and illustrated.