The maritime industry has a strong need to develop tools to improve efficiency and quality of business processes within a world wide community. The interactions among the different participants in a business endeavour can take place in a variety of forms. Of particular interest to this project is a new form of inter?enterprise co-ordination structure: networks. Briefly stated, networks are a set of organisations who participate in a general pattern of interaction which can be described as a process. The maritime industry is such a co-ordination structure in the sense that most of its activities occur in the form of a constant interplay between a variety of actors: ship yards, classification societies, suppliers, and legal/insurance/government establishments. The co-ordination structure adopted by these industries is especially important since it often determines the ability to react to market changes, flexibility, and in many cases also a large part of the administrative overhead and competitiveness. It has often been pointed out that information technologies could play a significant role in supporting the co-ordination structure by providing better means to interact and monitor the interaction as well as by creating new business opportunities. This "electronic medium", capable of delivering value added services to the participants, encompasses many different technological areas: from communication to security, databases, and transaction support, among many others. Of these, the project will concentrate on an essential component of such electronic medium: workflow management services. In particular, the goal of the project is to develop an adaptable workflow engine through which the activities of the different participants in the maritime industry can be harmonised, combined, and expanded through better tracking of functional dependencies, improved data access and handling, and lower administrative overheads. Existing workflow products have proven their ability to achieve considerable improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and flexibility by co-ordinating and streamlining complex business processes within organisations. In order to bring these advantages to the European and Mediterranean maritime industry so that they can gain a substantial competitive edge, existing commercial products need to be enhanced and extended: current workflow systems are complex to install, use and maintain, have only limited resilience to failures since they do not support a truly distributed architecture, have poor scalability, and are too inflexible to cope with the characteristics of the maritime industry. Furthermore, existing Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) fail to satisfy the user expectations in areas such as handling heterogeneity and interoperability, providing data consistency, and providing advanced security mechanisms. The workflow engine to be developed as part of this project will address these crucial issues with a special emphasis on the ease of use, maintenance, and customisation to the needs of maritime industry.