Specifying lifecycles of object interactions within distributed systems

Presents a state model for interface bindings, as defined by those recommendations of the Basic Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (ODP) that concern object interactions. To distinguish between other kinds of relationship bindings, such as associations and aggregations, we call the interactions across object interfaces "cooperation relations". In order to manage the configuration of distributed systems, we introduce the configuration state of a cooperation relation, and refine the lifecycle of such a relation according to the value space of its configuration state. A formalization of the configuration state and an example of a self-manageable cooperation relation are presented. The identification of different kinds of cooperation relations is presented across a distributed system which is currently being used as an experimental platform.