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.