Research Areas (under construction, links still lead to german version)

Design Methods, Languages and Tools for complex, distributed and mobile Systems

The long-term goal of this project is the development, implementation and evaluation of methods helpful for the development of robust and easy-to-use software for complex systems in general. We put a focus on the specific problems typical for distributed systems here.

Robust and adaptive Service-oriented Architectures

Development of design methods, languages and middleware to ease the development of SOA-based B2B applications. We are especially interested in provable correct systems that allow for early design-evaluation due to rigorous development methods and tools. Additionally, we work on approaches to autonomic compoenents and container-support for such components in order to ensure robustness also at runtime.

Context-Models and Context-Support for small mobile devices

Investigation of methods and techniques for providing, representing and exchanging context information in networks of small mobile devices like, e.g. PDAs or smart phones. The focus is on the development of a truly distributed context model taking care of information reliability as well as privacy issues.

Peer-to-Peer Systems

Development of algorithms, techniques and middleware suitable for building applications based on únstructured as well as structured P2P systems. A specific focus is put on privacy as well as anonymity issues at the moment.

Agent and Multi-Agent Technology

Development of new approaches to use agents, especially Multi-Agent-Systems (MAS) and negotation techniques, for designing, organizing and optimizing complex distributed systems, esp. service-based architectures.

Visual Programming- and Design-Languages

The long-term goal of this project is the utilitization and investigation of visual metaphores and languages as well as visualization techniques to make design- and programming languages more understandable and, hence, easy-to-use.

Security and Anti-Pattern

The project focusses on the investigation of Java-based middleware for architectural security flaws and to develop means to find and overcome such problems.