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Michael Ignaz Schumacher
Visiting Scholar
No longer a member of RI.
For more information, see my personal homepage.
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My research interests follow three main directions related to semantic web services and workflows, agent-oriented software engineering and multiagent system applications. The problematic of coordination unifies my research in these different topics. From an application point of view, I am interested in the areas of medicine, biology, e-commerce and simulations.
*Semantic Web Services and Workflows*
The combination of Web Services and the Semantic Web can lead to a new technology infrastructure: semantic web services. The aim of this research is to study how web services from distinct providers can be automatically composed into workflows in order to solve concrete user requirements. Current projects:
- Web Service Composition with the open source Workflow System OpenWFE - Business Rules for Web Services - Distributed Directories of Web Services
*Agent-oriented Software Engineering*
The autonomous agent paradigm can be used as a strong abstraction to model and design complex concurrent and distributed applications. Modeling a multiagent system becomes an interaction-oriented process. To that aim, the key issue of multiagent engineering is coordination, or more concretely the handling of agent interactions, the organization of their environment, and the management of their subjective intra-agent dependencies. Software-engineering methodologies are needed to settle abstract descriptions into reality. My main focus is dedicated to requirements for agent platforms. In this context, I am especially interested in studying the notion of environment as a mean for ruling systems with e.g. security laws. Current projects:
- Objective and Subjective Coordination - The Governing Environment
*Multiagent System Applications*
Multiagent systems follow the vision of an Artificial Society of Software Agents roaming and interacting over networks (such as peer-to-peer systems) in structured environments. To that aim, the study of Agent Societies has to explore new programming paradigms to support the engineering of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) based on standard technologies. Current projects:
- Agent-based Micro-simulation of the whole Swiss Highway Network - Agent-based Simulation of Intelligent Highways - Smart Mobile Context-aware Timetable Application for the Public Tranports of Lausanne - Multiuser Preference Discovery
Since August 2004, I am a research associate in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). See my Publications page there for publications prior to my arrival at the Robotics Institute.
artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, and planning