Coordinating distributed components over the Internet

Internet-based applications are likely to increase dramatically in the coming years, particularly with the emergence of electronic commerce and the growing interest in collaborative work (among humans). Incorporating autonomous and widely distributed computational components into a network-centric application is a complex and multidimensional task, encompassing integration, communication, negotiation, deployment and coordination. The key challenge is to balance execution autonomy with the potential payoff of leveraging existing components to perform collaborative computations