Implementing inter-domain trader cooperation

The trader is an important distributed platform service. It enables searching for object interfaces by service type and properties. Unfortunately, trader interworking has to cope with technological or administrative heterogeneity and has to be supported by gateways. We introduce a trader design and performance results of a gateway for the ANSAware and Orbix distributed platforms. A new approach to service type integration based on abstract IDL classes is described. Interworking between traders in different administrative domains has to be based on a contractual base. Therefore, we introduce a federation contract negotiation protocol based on the notion of system management policies.