Laboratory for Systems of Decentralised Coordination - SDK

The SDK laboratory aims to develop intelligent processes and systems for decentralized decision-making and coordination. The methods and systems to be developed are to be applied both to scientific benchmark problems and to practical problems of companies from the region. The research work developed in the laboratory should be published in relevant peer-reviewed journals, if possible. Finally, another goal is to introduce students to research.

In the past, decision support systems were primarily used for central decision making (exactly one decision maker). The progress of information and communication technology increasingly motivates the development of decentralized decision making systems, which enable the coordination of several autonomous decision makers. In concrete terms, two research priorities are to be set with regard to processes and applications:

1. Development and evaluation of new decentralized coordination algorithms based on swarm intelligence for autonomous vehicles in road traffic. In this context, the driving behaviour of autonomous vehicles on motorways, such as when changing lanes or adjusting speed, is to be optimised by means of black-based rules. In order to evaluate the coordination approaches to be developed, a simulation tool is to be developed and real data from an automobile manufacturer is to be used.
2. Exploration of generic, model-based negotiation strategies for intelligent software agents in the cooperative solution of decentralized decision problems. Decentralized benchmark problems from the areas of supply chain management, multi-project scheduling and load management in smart grids are used for evaluation. The coordination procedures to be developed will be implemented and tested within the framework of multi-agent systems.

The algorithms and systems developed in the lab will be used in the following lectures to motivate the development of algorithms:

• Operations Research, Bachelor's degree in Computer Science
• Operations Research, Bachelor's Degree Programme in Information Logistics
• Operations Research, Bachelor of Business Information Systems
• Project Business Informatics, Bachelor's Degree in Business Informatics
• Computer Science 2, Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics
• Data structures and algorithms, Master's Degree in Mathematics
• Data structures and algorithms, Master of Software Technology

The developed systems are partly used as e-learning systems:

• Evaluation system for multi-project scheduling (www.mpsplib.com)
• Evaluation system for multi-level lot-size planning (www.dmlulsp.com)