Most work in the multiclatabase systems (MDBSs) area has focused on the issues of transaction management and concurrency control. It is difficult to implement traditional transaction management techniques in a MDBS due to the heterogeneity and autonomy of the connected local sites. In this thesis, we present a new transaction execution model that captures the formalism and semantics of various extended transaction models and adopts them to a MDBS environment. The proposed model covers nested transactions, various dejjendenc}' types among subtransactions, and commit-independent transactions. The execution model does not make any assumption regarding the concurrency control protocols executed at the local sites connected to the MDBS. VVe also present a detailed simulation model of a MDBS to aiiiilyze the performance of the proposed model. The performances of both the traditional transaction model and the proposed transaction model are evaluated under a range of workloads and system configurations. The performance impact of global transactions’ behavior on local transactions is also discussed.