DynamiCS (Dynamically Configurable Software) is a DFG-funded research project of the Distributed Systems Group (VSIS) aiming at designing and implementing highly dynamic, configurable and inter-operable software components to be applied in heterogeneous distributed environments, especially providing support for building innovative electronic commerce applications.

The scope of this project covers both the system and development support level, on which enabling technologies for building such highly dynamic components are developed, as well as the application level, on which ready-to-use services and components for electronic market scenarios are designed and implemented.

In particular, DynamiCS puts a strong focus on the following aspects:

• Componentware This new programming paradigm is investigated and further developed to enable the development of highly customisable components which can be linked together using different plug-in mechanisms to provide an application semantics dynamically.
• Policy and Rule Management Generic mechanisms to formalise, evaluate, compare, match and activate policies and rules for distributed applications such as business objects have been developed to support dynamic configuration and especially co-operation of application components.
• Automated Negotiation A framework providing dynamic negotiation capabilities including different exchangeable protocol, strategy, communication and rule modules is being developed.
• Self-adapting Mobile Objects Mobile application objects, especially mobile agents, are being equipped with intelligent interfaces and reflection mechanisms so that they can dynamically adapt to the differently constituted environments they could migrate to as well as possible.
• Interoperability Mechanisms to enable co-operation between different (middleware) platforms such as DCE, CORBA, Voyager etc. and to hide the heterogeneity from the application components have been designed and implemented.