The paper reports on research to design and implement a service-based, secure collaborative workflow system for Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment (DAME). This has been developed by the Universities of York, Sheffield, Oxford and Leeds, and industrial partners, Rolls-Royce and Data Systems and Solutions (DS&S). DAME is a prototype system to support aircraft engine maintenance and predictive services. It is an example of a virtual organisation with grid-based services running at the four universities sites. To meet the industrial requirements strong security is implemented to protect commercially sensitive services and data.

Application services have been coordinated using the DAME workflow management system to automate business processes and control collaborative access. A dynamic workflow-team policy is used to authorise user access to workflow instances and corresponding service instances.

The paper includes aspects of an initial evaluation with the industrial participants and illustrates the feasibility of using DAME in an industrial environment.