Evolving and Using Coordinated Systems

A four-layer architecture is outlined for the design of systems required to accommodate higher levels of evolution and personalization. This architecture is based on the separation of four different aspects that concern change: the computations the system has to perform to ensure basic functionalities, the interactions that can be superposed among those computations to make global properties emerge, the configurations of computations and interactions that respond to current business requirements, and the "contexts" in which the system is used according to organizational policies.