Swarms in Industry

The agents of a swarm cooperate without central control and act according to simple and local behavior. Through their interactions a collective behavior can emerge to solve complex tasks. Swarm behavior is inspired by nature such as swarms of bees, flocks of birds, or shoals of fish. The concept is gaining traction in technical systems, especially in Industry 4.0, for instance, in production optimization. The overall goal is to balance WIP waves and flow factors in a bottom-up fashion.

In production plants organized by the job shop principle, the factory-wide scheduling problem is NP-hard and can become extremely large.  In addition, the increased dynamics of customized, flexible, on-demand production processes enlarge the solution space. In these settings, traditional optimization methods, such as linear optimization, reach their limits due to excessive computation time. Algorithms employing self-organization can handle NP-hard problems and find solutions for complex problems. The innovation of swarm intelligence is not to produce pre-calculated schedules or routing tables but to apply nature-inspired rules that are executed locally by individual agents in their decision making. This leads to heavily reactive algorithms that are able to compensate for dynamic changes in their local vicinity, and facilitate adaptive, scalable, and robust production scheduling.

These concepts, approaches, implementations and evaluations will be discussed during the Research Days 2022!

About the Research Days

The Lakeside Research Days are organized by the Lakeside Labs as a four-day workshop in July. It takes place at Lakeside Labs in Klagenfurt, Austria, near the beautiful Wörthersee lake and Alps scenery. Invited experts, local professors, and young researchers discuss and elaborate ideas in the field of Self-Organizing Systems. The main emphasis of the workshop is on soliciting discussions and creating new ideas regarding topics related to self-organizing systems. The event greatly supports scientific exchange, networking, the establishment of international collaborations, and joint research projects. The following videos gives a nice impression of the Research Days 2019 and 2017:

Further videos can be found at the Lakeside Labs YouTube channel.
The Research Days have been organized in Klagenfurt since 2008. Notable results from previous Research Days have been research collaborations, several joint papers, organization of conference special sessions, and the conception and submission of joint research projects in the EU framework.