Description

Leader of the group Intelligent and Autonomous Systems: Eric Pauwels.

Increasingly, our social and technological world is organised around complex systems. These are dynamic networks of interacting nodes (or agents) that continuously exchange digital or physical resources, including data or information, energy, materials and products. The agents in these systems face real challenges, as they often only have access to partial and noisy information and need to operate in a constantly changing and uncertain environment. As a consequence, there is an unrelenting pressure to improve the network’s overall performance and resilience by making the individual nodes more intelligent and autonomous.

In our research group, we study generic and fundamental mechanisms that enable the emergence of various degrees of organization, intelligence and autonomy in such systems, and apply them to concrete problems of societal relevance.

For more information on our seminars, visit the seminar webpage.

We invite talented Master's and PhD candidates to have a look at our internships.

 

 
 

Vacancies

Postdoc (CWI, Amsterdam): Learning utility functions for Negotiation & Intelligent Control

Autonomous control requires a model of the preferences for the user (or users) to be represented. This model must deal with partial information and uncertainty, which may be addressed with techniques from function approximation and machine learning/planning under uncertainty. The Grid-Friends project has a vacancy for a postdoctoral researcher to address local control in smart energy cooperatives, in charge of optimizing the activation of flexible assets and external negotiation commitments. The vacant position aims to build on meaningful representations of partial preference models, devise negotiation and/or control strategies given such models, and build novel preference elicitation algorithms to optimally query a user to improve utility function approximations (of an individual or a collective).

Internship at CWI Amsterdam (duration 6 months) for business development of a novel product idea in energy flexibility trading

Energy systems are currently in a revolutionary transition, due to the increasing inclusion of sustainable energy sources. Whereas in the past, energy supply was determined by demand and was supplied centrally, in the future, demand and increasingly decentralized supply will need to respond to each other. Their balancing requires a combination of adjusting conventional generation, exploiting efficient storage technologies and implementing demand response with corresponding incentives thereof. Balancing activities may take place on multiple scales, from the individual household to the European or even an envisioned global grid. The transition to smart energy systems is changing business processes, markets and exchange traded products for balancing flexibility.

Internship at CWI Amsterdam (duration 6 months) for optimisation/machine learning on a novel product idea in energy flexibility trading

Energy systems are currently in a revolutionary transition, due to the increasing inclusion of sustainable energy sources. Whereas in the past, energy supply was determined by demand and was supplied centrally, in the future, demand and increasingly decentralized supply will need to respond to each other. Their balancing requires a combination of adjusting conventional generation, exploiting efficient storage technologies and implementing demand response with corresponding incentives thereof. Balancing activities may take place on multiple scales, from the individual household to the European or even an envisioned global grid. The transition to smart energy systems is changing business processes, markets and exchange traded products for balancing flexibility.

News

Software agents arrange freight more efficiently

Software agents arrange freight more efficiently

Traffic jams regularly bring Dutch highways to a halt. Freight is often a major cause of such bottlenecks. Interestingly enough almost one third of all trucks drive around empty. PhD student Valentin Robu of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research center for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, examined the efficiency in logistics and saw room for improvement through the use of intelligent software agents.

Software agents arrange freight more efficiently - Read More…

Members

Associated Members

Publications

Current projects with external funding

  • Data-driven monitoring, prediction and real-time control for the smart grid and its users (project C)
  • Distributed Ledger Services for Online Settlement (DLS OCS)
  • Framework for demand-supply matching and ancillary service provision through distributed energy resources (project D)
  • Lectoraat Urban Analytics
  • PPS met Cofely
  • Universality, critical indices and resilience in logistics networks: a mean field approach
  • Adaptive clustering for Decentralised Resilient Energy Management (ADREM)
  • Demand response for grid-friendly quasi-autarkic energy cooperatives (Grid-Friends)
  • Heat and Power Systems at Industrial Sites and Harbours (HaPSISH)
  • Representing Users in a Negotiation (RUN): An Autonomous Negotiator Under Preference Uncertainty (RUN)
  • SG BEMS: De kunst van het optimaliseren (SG BEMS)
  • Scalable Interoperability in Information Systems for Agile Supply Chains (SIISASC)
  • Stable and scalable decentralized power balancing systems using adaptive clustering (STASCADE)

Related partners

  • Almende
  • Alstom
  • Brainport Development
  • Descartes
  • DNV GL
  • Eaton
  • Endinet
  • Enexis
  • Kropman Installatietechniek
  • Locamation
  • LogIT Systems
  • Net2Grid
  • Stedin
  • TenneT
  • Thales
  • Vortech
  • Cofely West Nederland
  • Hogeschool van Amsterdam
  • TNO
  • Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
  • Technische Universiteit Delft