A Formal Model of Availability to Reduce Cross-Domain Interruptions

The mutual awareness and availability across team members is essential for effective and efficient cooperation. Yet, interruptions in general and interruptions unrelated to the current domain and task in particular can lead to disturbing disruption. The literature on boundary management has great insight to offer with respect to organising and maintaining a balance between different life domains. In this paper we introduce a formal model of the semantic structure of life domains, grounded in the concept of integration and segmentation found in boundary theory. This formal model is based on simple set theory and relations. It is system unrelated but serves as a starting point for creating further implementation specific models in UML or other notations during the development process.