The Competence Center Agent Core Technologies does research and development in the context of agent oriented technologies. In close collaboration with industry these technologies,methods and tools are explored and applied to scenarios in areas as diverse as telecommunication, energy, and (electric) mobility. Goal is to quickly and efficiently create scalable systems and smart services, and to master their complex behavior while retaining all possible degrees of freedom, for the participating entities as well as the entire system.

Agent Oriented Software Engineering

Goal is the development of methods, frameworks and tools for the creation of agent oriented applications and services. The application and usability of these methods is tested in industry and research focused projects, and results are constantly fed back to the further development.

Semantic Services

Semantic service descriptions in service oriented architectures extend interface definitions from purely syntactical signatures to containing semantic information. This approach allows to for example enable automation of service usage.

Adaptive Agents and Self-Organisation

Today's software systems are constantly subjected to change. In particular, unexpected events within the software but also the environment can make a subsequent adaptation of the software necessary. These adaptations are currently mainly done manually, through changes of configuration options or changes within the software itself. Adaptive systems are capable of executing these changes autonomously.

Agents in Sensor Environments

One area where extreme distribution and dynamics can be observed is the area of sensor networks. Agent oriented approaches are well suited to this environment, but any practical implementation needs to deal with the additional requirements of limited resource usage.

Management of Distributed Systems

Due to the inherent complexity and size of today's distributed systems the control and management of such infrastructures is a challenge for administrators and developers. Management tools such as ASGARD allow to control and manage distributed systems in real time, using advanced 3D views that purvey relevant information without overloading the user, and allows structural views of running systems.

Agents and e-Mobility

Multi-agent systems are generally perceived as a good approach for automated solution of distributed and complex tasks. This certainly applies to the new area of electric mobility, where the system, while searching for optimal charging strategies pursues different goals for different actors, all while keeping track of many parameters.