On the co-operative management of domains in open distributed systems

The authors describe the need for collaboration of managers in co-operative applications where federative operational structures must be harmonized with the hierarchical organizational environment. A federation concept is introduced which augments existing hierarchical domain management policies and procedures. The concept includes proposals for federative domains, manager domains, and collaboration procedures. An approach to the co-operative management of domains based on this concept is described. The approach relates a group of managers to a group of managed objects and proposes rules for the collaboration between the managers before executing operations on the objects. Remarks on the importance of related access control mechanisms and the need for the dynamic creation and modification of manager groups are added