System-level infrastructure issues for controlled interactions among autonomous participants in electronic commerce processes

Electronic commerce in open large scale distributed environments presents several system level challenges in terms of execution model, infrastructure and management. The autonomy of providers severely restricts the scope of control by authorities other than the owner of each service, and makes the design of the distributed software architecture a challenging undertaking. We present our ongoing work toward the development of a distributed software substrate to support controlled interactions among components that are owned and managed by autonomous authorities. This infrastructure is based on a distributed component model, designed to support the paradigm of service level management for specifying and managing commitments made by independent service providers to their clients on performance related attributes of services.