The paper reports on ongoing research into the development of a management system to co-ordinate a set of activities of a virtual organisation for the production of chemicals. The paper reports on the authors' experience in considering a real virtual organisation and raises issues of co-ordinating atomic activities that span across organisational boundaries and deals with systems that possess a high degree of autonomy and dynamicity. The focus here is on determining the requirements in terms of

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... the co-ordination of parallel activities, trust and security issues such as access control, validation of resources and identities, formalisation, risk analysis and finally fault tolerance.