Exception handling and resolution in distributed object-oriented systems

We address the problem of how to handle exceptions in distributed object-oriented systems. In a distributed computing environment exceptions may be raised simultaneously and thus need to be treated in a coordinated manner. We take two kinds of concurrency into account: 1) several objects are designed collectively and invoked concurrently to achieve a global goal, and 2) concurrent objects or object groups that are designed independently compete for the same system resources. We propose a new distributed algorithm for resolving concurrent exceptions and show that the algorithm works correctly even in complex nested situations, and is an improvement over previous proposals in that it requires only O(N/sup 2/) messages, and is fully object-oriented.