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Welcome

Welcome to the Almende website. At the basis of our research stands the idea of self-organization in complex adaptive systems, and the notion of hybrid networks: humans and computers working together as one system.

 

Information and communication technology, especially multi-agent technology, can be used to organize networks. We explore the fundamentals of self-organization and ways to incorporate them into the following networks:

 

Networks of people: Agents can communicate much faster and with more others than humans can. We use agents to take care of highly frequent and dynamic communication to support human organizations. Agents adapt based on human interaction

 

Networks of entities: We investigate how distributed coordination can be used to support organizations in last-minute planning and scheduling. Trucks and packages are represented by software-agents and they negotiate to provide an effective solution

 

Sensors networks: The challenge is to develop ways to introduce learning / conditioning in the sensor network to create a dynamic filtering and escalation system that triggers reaction when necessary.

 

Underlying the research, we have developed a technology platform called CHAP: Common Hybrid Agent Platform. The goal is to provide a rich base architecture for building adaptive distributed systems comprising both artificial entities and human actors.

 


News

 

October 2008

Almende @ BNAIC 2008

Almende researchers Tamás Máhr, Xiaoyu Mao, Duco Ferro and Freek van Polen will be present at the next edition of BNAIC (30-31 Octover). Máhr will present Agent Performance in Vehicle Routing when the Only Thing Certain is Uncertainty, written in collaboration with  Jordan Srour (TU Delft), Mathijs de Weerdt (TU Delft) and Rob Zuidwijk (TU Delft). The poster session of the 20th edition of the Belgian-Netherlands Conference on Artificial Intelligence will feature Almende's Xiaoyu Mao, Duco Ferro and Freek van Polen.  Read more...

 

September 2008

Agent-based incident communication support @ MATES 2008

Almende's Duco Ferro and TU Delft's full professor Catholijn Jonker presented their paper Filtering Algorithms for Agent-Based Incident Communication Support in Mobile Human Surveillance at MATES 2008. The sixth edition of Multi-agent system Technologies, aimed to promote the theory and applications of agent- and multi-agent technologies, was held in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Read more...

 

August 2008

Inside look at Replicator project Logo_FP7

For all those interested in the development of an advanced robotic system, consisting of a super-large-scale swarm of small autonomous mobile micro-robots that are capable of self-assembling into large artificial organisms, Anne van Rossum is giving you a look into the Replicator kitchen Read more ...