A Cooperative Approach to Support Software Deployment Using the Software Dock

Software deployment is an evolving collection of interre-lated processes such as release, install, adapt, reconfigure, update, activate, deactivate, remove, and retire. The con-nectivity of large networks, such as the Internet, is affecting how software deployment is being performed. To take full advantage of this connectivity, new software deployment technologies must be introduced in order to support these processes. The Software Dock research project is creating a distributed, agent-based deployment framework to sup-port the ongoing cooperation and negotiation among soft-ware producers themselves and among software producers and software consumers. This deployment framework is enabled by the use of a standardized semantic schema for describing software systems, called the Deployable Soft