Appl Intell (2012) 36:768–787 DOI 10.1007/s10489-011-0294-z Ontology-driven coordination model for multiagent-based mobile workforce brokering systems Arash Mousavi · M. Jan Nordin · Zulaiha Ali Othman Published online: 19 April 2011 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Coordination has been recognized by many re- searchers as the most important feature of multi-agent sys- tems. Coordination is defined as managing interdependen- cies amongst activities (Malone and Crowston in ACM Comput. Surv. 26(1):87–119, 1994). The traditional ap- proach of implementing a coordination mechanism is to hard-wire it into a coordination system at design time. How- ever, in dynamic and open environments, many attributes of the system cannot be accurately identified at the design time. Therefore, dynamic coordination, capable of coordinating activities at run-time, has emerged. On the other hand, a suc- cessful dynamic coordination model for multi-agent sys- tems requires knowledge sharing as well as common vocab- ulary. Therefore, an ontological approach is an appropriate way in proposing dynamic coordination models for multi- agent systems. In this paper, an Ontology-Driven Dynamic Coordination Model (O-DC) for Multiagent-Based Mobile Workforce Brokering Systems (MWBS) (Mousavi et al. in Int. J. Comput. Sci. 6:(5):557–565, 2010; Mousavi et al. in Proceedings of 4th IEEE international symposium on in- formation technology, ITSim’10, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 15–17 June 2010, vol. 3, pp. 1416–1421, 2010; Mousavi and Nordin in Proceedings of the IEEE international con- ference on electrical engineering and informatics, Bandung, Indonesia, 17–19 June 2007, pp. 294–297, 2007) is pro- posed and formulated. Subsequently, the applicability of O- DC is examined via simulation based on a real-world sce- nario. A. Mousavi ( ) · M.J. Nordin · Z.A. Othman School of Computer Science, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, University Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600, Bangi, Malaysia e-mail: arash_mousavi@yahoo.com Keywords Dynamic coordination · Ontology · Multi-agent systems · Mobile workforce management system · Mobile workforce brokering system 1 Introduction Coordination plays a vital role in open distributed systems where several different processes act concurrently and inter- dependably in a dynamic environment to achieve common goals. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to de- scribe how such an effective and ontology-driven dynamic coordination model can be modeled, formulated and imple- mented. For this reason, we believe that selecting a domain of discourse, which exhibits the common characteristics of a typical open distributed system such as openness, diversity and concurrency is an appropriate approach to achieve the aforementioned objective. An example of such an open distributed system is Mobile Workforce Brokering System (MWBS), an essential com- ponent of every Mobile Workforce Management Systems (MWM) [1]. MWBS In essence has to manage a diverse range of mobile workforces who are distributed in differ- ent geographical locations and may use different types of mobile devices in a concurrent manner. Moreover, MWBS has to deal with other open systems within the body of its MWM. Therefore, MWBS is a fitting example of open dis- tributed systems. We have selected MWBS as our domain of discussion for three major reasons. First of all, MWBS is a system that has to be situated in a dynamic, unpredictable and uncertain en- vironment (mobile environments) and therefore, it has to ad- dress certain risks. Next, MWBS comprises distributed pro- cesses (individual entities) that have to coordinate with each other in order to achieve a set of common goals. Finally, for