A dynamic, distributed directed activity network comprising a directed activity control program specifying tasks to be executed including required individual task inputs and outputs, the required order of task execution, permitted parallelism in task execution, task adjacency to subsequent tasks, and reachability from each task to other tasks; a plurality of task execution agents, individual of said agents having a set of dynamically changing agent attributes and capable of executing different required tasks; a plurality of task execution controllers, each controller associated with one or more of the task execution agents with access to dynamically changing agent attributes; a directed activity controller for communicating with said task execution controllers for directing execution of said activity control program; and, a communications network supporting communication between said directed activity controller and task execution controllers for directing execution of said directed activity control program using selected task execution agents.