Apparatus, methods and computer programs provided for metering and
accounting in a commercial e-services infrastructure address the
requirement for handling composite services in which higher-level
services are built using simpler underlying services, each of which may
be autonomously owned and operated. Metering records for each service
underlying a composite service are correlated, enabling accounting which
takes account of the usage and charges associated with the underlying
services, on a per-request basis or on an aggregated basis for each
customer-provider pair over a given billing period.