The Gang of Four's Chain of Responsibility (COR) behavioral design pattern is interesting and commonly used to model a set of operations. Each operation needs to be modeled as a command object and linked to others to form a chain. The command objects act upon some data and indicate whether the control should get passed to the next command in the chain. The benefit is that an operation can be added or removed easily without changing code. The complete article can be found here http://www.devx.com/Java/Article/29392/0/page/4
A fairly comprehensive pair of articles which focus only on the Commons Chain are at O'Reilly's OnJava site:
[http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/03/02/commonchains.html ONJava.com – A Look at Commons Chain, Part 1]
[http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/03/02/commonchains2.html ONJava.com – A Look at Commons Chain, Part 2]