Otthein Herzog

Tongji University (Shanghai PRC) and University of Bremen

The acquisition of knowledge plays a crucial role in improving business processes. Process discovery is a technique employed to obtain essential information about actual operations in the form of process models. However, the process discovery encounters various challenges that hinder the quality of the resulting process model. The misleading or low...

The digitalization of logistics processes is often based on distributed models and decentralized control. As these logistics models constitute an important part of Industrie 4.0 concepts they must be powerful enough to cover dynamic processes and must enable a host of functions such as goal-oriented, reactive, pro-active, communicative, cooperative...

Material handling is an important process in the mining industry because of its high operational cost. In this process, shovels extract and load materials that must be transported by trucks to different destinations at the mine. When a truck ends an unloading operation, it requires a new loading destination. If a centralized system provides destina...

Process mining is a promising way to extract insight knowledge on business processes in manufacturing and logistics. However, implementing process mining is challenging in dynamic and complex environments as the discovered process models may not reach the aspired quality. As a result, current process mining solutions do not hold in practical situat...

Material handling is an important logistic process for open-pit mines. In this process, shovels extract materials and load trucks that transport these materials to different destinations. To support this process, different centralized dispatching solutions have been implemented based on mathematical programming, heuristic processes or simulation mo...

The requirements of transport processes have become increasingly complex due to shorter transit times, the individual qualities of shipments, and higher amounts of small sized orders. Especially in courier and express services providing same day deliveries, the high degree of dynamics even increases this complexity. To ensure reliable and flexible...

The digital turn in visual studies has played a major role in the terminological overlap between ‘archive’, ‘database’ and ‘corpus’, and it has brought about a number of positive developments such as improved accessibility and availability. At the same time, it has also raised important questions pertaining to the materiality, searchability, annota...

In industrial domains such as manufacturing control, a trend away from centralized planning and scheduling towards more flexible distributed agent-based approaches could be observed over recent years. To be of practical relevance, the local control mechanisms of the autonomous agents must be able to dependably adhere and dynamically adjust to compl...

Software agents are a well-established approach for modeling autonomous entities in distributed artificial intelligence. Iterated negotiations allow for coordinating the activities of multiple autonomous agents by means of repeated interactions. However, if several agents interact concurrently, the participants’ activities can mutually influence ea...

Software agents are a well-established approach for modeling autonomous entities in distributed artificial intelligence. Iterated negotiations allow for coordinating the activities of multiple autonomous agents by means of repeated interactions. However, if several agents interact concurrently, the participants’ activities can mutually influence ea...

This chapter presents the concepts, an example implementation, and the evaluation of an autonomous, self-organized, and adaptive multiagent system to optimize industrial processes in dynamic environments. In order to satisfy the rising requirements which result from the Fourth Industrial Revolution and to benefit from the consequent integration of...

In this paper we review recent advances of randomized AI search in solving industrially relevant optimization problems. The method we focus on is a sampling-based solution mechanism called Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which is extended by the concepts of nestedness and policy adaptation to establish a better trade-off between exploitation and ex...

From letters and books to medicines, express and courier delivery services have become an integral part of urban life. Managing these services presents new logistical challenges. A transfer project has revealed that self-management and local optimisation deliver greater flexibility.

Oceanic storms are the main reason for shipping delays in the North Atlantic Ocean, due to the uncertainty in the forecast of tropical cyclones and extra tropical winter storms. This work investigates the relation between the statistical storm risk and the accuracy of the wind and wave forecast in the North Atlantic. The evaluation is based on hist...

In diesem Beitrag wird das Mobile Solution Center Bremen vorge-stellt und es werden die Möglichkeiten der mobilen Arbeitsunterstützung auf-gezeigt mit Aussagen zum Markt, zum Potenzial und den verfügbaren Techno-logien. Lösungen aus dem Integrierten EU-Projekt wearIT@work werden dis-kutiert für die exemplarischen Einsatzfelder Flugzeugwartung, Prod...

This paper presents an autonomous multiagent system which optimizes the planning and scheduling of industrial processes using the example of courier and express services. In order to handle the rising demands and to capitalize on the increasing optimization potential in transport logistics, which both result from the consequent integration of indus...

The goods structure effect increases the complexity and dynamics of logistic processes. To handle the resulting challenges and requirements, planning and controlling of logistic processes have to be reliable and adaptive. Especially in these dynamic environments, Multiagent-Based Simulation (MABS) is a suitable approach to support decision makers i...

It is known that uncertainty of weather predictions varies depending on the weather prediction horizon and the general weather conditions. For applications which depend on weather prediction accuracy like wind power production or weather routing for ships it is therefore necessary to estimate the uncertainty of predictions. A common practice is to...

Since the last decade, the consideration of customer demands is of increasing importance for manufacturing enterprises. This situation provides a great opportunity to small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to improve their competitiveness within the global economy. Due to their proximity to the customer, flat management structures and the resulti...

The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the consequent integration of the Internet of Things and Services into industrial processes increase the requirements of transport processes. Customer demanding same-day deliveries, shorter transit-times, individual qualities of shipments, and higher amounts of small size orders raise the complexity and dynamics...

This work assesses the accuracy of the wind speed and wind direction forecast in the German North and Baltic Seas by comparing measurements from offshore observation stations in the sea with forecasts data by the German Weather Service which have been linearly interpolated in time. The seasonal and geographical variations are discussed by evaluatio...

Due to demographic changes a lot of research in the field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has been done within the last years. Many of the project systems never left the status of a research prototype nor reached real home environments. The “Länger selbstbestimmt Wohnen” (LsW) project is one step beyond the targets of typical research projects and...

In this paper we present a PDDL-based multi-agent planning system for reasoning about key performance indicators (KPIs) in an industrial production planning and control application scenario. On top of PDDL, numeric key figures and associated objectives are configured by the user at run-time and then processed automatically by the system in order to...

Many robotics and mechatronics systems rely on a fast analysis of visual landmarks. Recently, binary feature representations of the popular SIFT and SURF landmarks have been proposed that offer large speed improvements and low memory consumption at high accuracy. In this paper, we compare a binarisation based on median-centred hyperplanes to the d...

Performance measurement by means of key performance indicators (KPIs) is a widespread device for communicating qualitative and quantitative business objectives throughout an organization and monitoring their achievement. It seems desirable to also apply this concept to dependably influencing the operational behaviour of distributed agent controlled...

Planning with numeric state variables and goal systems today still poses a challenging task within the field of computational intelligence. In this paper a two-tier planning system is presented that enables the optimization of continuous numeric action parameters in combinatorially enumerated plans. It allows resorting to a “satisficing” strategy b...

Briefe, Bücher, Medikamente — Express- und Kurierleistungen gehören heute zum städtischen Alltag. Sie zu steuern, stellt die Logistik vor neue Herausforderungen. Ein Transferprojekt zeigt, dass dabei Selbststeuerung und lokale Optimierung für mehr Flexibilität sorgen.

Codebooks are a widely accepted technique to recognise objects by sets of local features. The method has been applied to many classes of objects, even very abstract ones. But although state of the art recognition rates have been reported, the method is still far away from being reliable in any sense that is related to human vision. The literature o...

Video streams generate the better part of the internet traffic due to platforms such as YouTube and Youku in China. A novel genre-adaptive solution is presented in this paper benefitting from an interdisciplinary approach combining image and sound processing features from Pattern Recognition with high-level concepts from Mass Communications. It is...

In this research and technology transfer project, the planning and control processes of the industrial partner Hellmann Worldwide Logistics GmbH & Co. KG are analyzed. An agent-based approach is presented to model current processes and to exploit the identified optimization potential. The developed system directly connects the information flow and...

The complexity and dynamics in group age traffic requires flexible, efficient, and adaptive planning and controlling processes. While the general problem refers to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), additional requirements have to be fulfilled in application. Individual properties and priorities of orders, a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, dynamic...

This paper examines multi-agent coordination for resource allocation tasks in autonomous logistics processes. It identifies requirements for the learning of optimal behavior in a multi-agent setting. Based on a real-world logistics application, the paper distinguishes between single resource allocation by independent agents and joint activities by...

Supply network management is a challenging task due to the complexity, the dynamics, and the distribution of logistics processes. Automated process control thus requires to reduce the computational complexity and to cope with the dynamics locally. The paradigm of autonomous control in logistics means that control of logistics processes is delegated...

The complexity and dynamics in groupage traffic require flexible, efficient, and adaptive planning and control processes. The general problem of allocating orders to vehicles can be mapped into the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). However, in practical applications additional requirements complicate the dispatching processes and require a proactive a...

This paper addresses improved urban mobility using multiagent simulation. We provide a description of the agent model and the routing infrastructure as a step towards a rich model of the interactions that happen in intermodal transport planning tasks. The multiagent model is generic in the sense that different public and individual transport agents...

Multiagent-based simulation is an approach to realize stochastic simulation where both the behavior of the modeled multiagent system and dynamic aspects of its environment are implemented with autonomous agents. Such simulation provides an ideal environment for intelligent agents to learn to perform their tasks before being deployed in a real-world...

Iterated negotiations are a well-established method for coordinating distributed activities in multiagent systems. However, if several of these take place concurrently, the participants' activities can mutually influence each other. In order to cope with the problem of interrelated interaction outcomes in partially observable environments, we apply...

The learnable evolution model is a stochastic optimization method which employs machine learning to guide the optimization process. LEM3, its newest implementation, combines its machine learning mode with other search operators. The presented research concerns its application within a multi-agent system for autonomous control of container on-carria...

Summarizing and abstracting of multimedia data is a field of great research interest, especially for multiple video platforms. In this paper we describe a system capable of generating Hollywood movie trailers automatically by using audio and video processing algorithms, combined with ontology-based knowledge and CLIPS, a rule based system. We show...

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive decision support system for individual persons (ADSIP). ADSIP will serve as a diagnosis assistant for a smart wearable computing system and aims to provide elderly people suffering from chronic diseases with reliable health status diagnosis in real time. The smart wearable computing system addresses un...

Software agents in complex, dynamic environments need to update, adapt, and improve their knowledge models for decision making in order to achieve adequate results. Their individual adaption often relies on machine learning from observational data. However, when data is not available in the required quantity and quality, alternative approaches are...

Conditional Exponential Models (CEM) are effectively used in several machine learning approaches, e.g., in Conditional Random Fields. Their feature functions are typically either satisfied or not. This paper presents a way to use partially matching feature functions which are satisfied to some degree and corresponding issues while training. Using p...

In this paper we consider efficiently matching logical constraint compositions called patterns by introducing a degree of satisfaction. The major advantage of our approach to other soft pattern matching methods is to exploit existing domain knowledge represented in Description Logic to handle imprecision in the data and to overcome the problem of a...

The increasing complexity of logistic networks calls for a paradigm change in their modeling and operations. Centralized control is no longer a feasible option when dealing with extremely large systems. For this reason, decentralized autonomous systems are gaining popularity in providing robustness and scalability. This chapter focuses on the use o...

Nicht erst seit Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts stehen »Neue Technologien« im Fokus der Öffentlichkeit. Von der Kernenergie über die Mikroelektronik bis hin zur Bio- und Nanotechnologie und dem Internet scheinen sie die Möglichkeitshorizonte moderner Gesellschaften zu definieren. Die Debatten um »Neue Technologien« erlauben deshalb Einblick in zentrale...

SIFT features have become extremely popular in computer vision because of their reliable matching qualities under changing lighting conditions. In Robotics they are ubiquitious in self localisation and mapping (SLAM), object tracking and recognition. However, the length of the descriptor is a major obstacle for real-time applications and mobile pla...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurological condition. It results from degeneration of dopamine producing neurons. This paper is on research partially funded by the European Commission (AAL programme and ICT FP7) where project consortia go towards the development of a personal health system with a closed loop of detection, response and t...

TV news reviews are of strong interest in media and communication sciences, since they indicate national and international social trends. To identify such trends, scientists from these disciplines usually work with manually annotated video data. In this paper, we investigate if the time-consuming process of manual annotation can be automated by usi...

Agent coordination is a fundamental task in designing and operating multiagent systems. However, in dynamically changing environments, coordination must balance proactive and reactive behaviors in order to enable efficient operations while retaining the necessary flexibility to react to unforeseen events. This paper introduces adaptive agent relati...

A highly accurate solution for the estimation of face poses over a wide range of 180 degree is presented. The result has been achieved by modeling the 3D arrangement of 15 facial features and its mapping to the image plane for different poses. A voting scheme is used to compute the mapping for a given image in a bottom-up procedure. The voting is b...

During the years 2004 to 2009, the European Commission Integrated Project wearIT@work has carried out the research of "wearable computing" as a technology to support the mobile workers in different environments. An imformative introduction to the research results and experiences of this project are given in this article in Chinese.

Supply networks are faced with the contradictory requirements of achieving high operational efficiency while retaining the ability to adapt to a changing environ- ment. Decentralized approaches representing logistics entities by autonomous artificial agents must therefore be enabled to structure and operate supply net- works efficiently according...

The Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem (DVRP) is an optimization problem in which agents deliver orders that are not known in advance to the routing. Partial solutions need to be adapted to continuously accommodate new orders within dynam- ically changing conditions. This research focuses on using a combination of multiagent-based autonomous control w...

Cloud computing denotes a paradigm shift in computing that enables a flexible allocation of hardware and software resources on demand. Therewith, it is particularly appealing for applications with a high degree of computational complexity and dynamics. This paper identifies logistics planning and control as a promising application for clouds. Howev...

Autonomous control in logistics decreases the computational effort for process control by problem decomposition. To this end, decision-making is delegated to the participating logistics entities. The more process control is decentralised the more interaction effort arises for coordinating the participants for efficient resource utilisation. This in...

Domain-specific time limits for the execution of agent-oriented knowledge management processes constitute a significant challenge for the design of autonomous logistic control with multi-agent systems. Tailored models are needed to support the agents’ decision-making, which gives rise to questions concerning the time span agents are granted to comp...

Between 2004 and 2009, the European Commission and 42 partners from 16 countries invested about 24 million Euros to empower mobile workers through the wearIT@work project. In addition to maintenance, production, healthcare, and emergency response, new application domains targeted included cultural heritage, a rural living lab for the prevention of...

A face recognition system for simultaneous detection and pose estimation is presented. The algorithm proceeds in two steps: At first, separate face components such as eyes, nose and mouth are detected. This is done by a classification of modified SIFT features that are more robust to spatial displacements. Secondly, face-like part constellations ar...

Logistics processes in a globalised economy are increasingly complex, dynamic, and distributed. These properties pose major challenges for logistics planning and control. Conventional centralised approaches are frequently limited in their Efficiency due to the high number of logistics objects and parameters to be considered. As an alternative, the...

Argumentation systems can be employed for detecting spatiotemporal patterns. While the idea of argumentation consists in defending specific positions, complex patterns are influenced by several factors that can be regarded as arguments against or in favor of the realisation of those patterns. The idea is to determine consistent positions of argumen...

Intrusion detection in computer networks faces the problem of a large number of both false alarms and unrecognized attacks. To improve the precision of detection, various machine learning techniques have been proposed. However, one critical issue is that the amount of reference data that contains serious intrusions is very sparse. In this paper we...

This paper presents a standards-based approach to connecting the information and material flows in autonomous cooperating logistics processes. The information flow is represented by a multi-agent system (MAS) with capabilities for the autonomous control of transport logistics processes. The material flow consists of the actual physical logistics ob...

This paper presents the research activities of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 637 “Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes—A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations” at the University of Bremen. After a motivation of autonomous logistics as an answer to current trends in increasingly dynamic markets, we sketch the structure and aims of the in...

This paper presents the research activities of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 637 “Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes—A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations” at the University of Bremen. After a motivation of autonomous logistics as an answer to current trends in increasingly dynamic markets, we sketch the structure and aims of the in...

In multiagent-based simulation systems the agent pro-gramming paradigm is adopted for simulation. This simu-lation approach offers the promise to facilitate the design and development of complex simulations, both regarding the distinct simulation actors and the simulation envi-ronment itself. We introduce the simulation middleware PlaSMA which exte...

It is shown that distance computations between SIFT-descriptors using the Euclidean distance suffer from the curse of dimensionality. The search for exact matches is less affected than the generalisation of image patterns, e.g. by clustering methods. Experimental results indicate that for the case of generalisation, the Hamming distance on binarise...

1.1.1Introduction Logistic processes are inherently dynamic and hence require the ability to plan and re-plan in complex situations, under rigid time constraints, and in light of uncertain, incomplete, and false information. Standard scenarios of logistic processes typically have been modeled on the basis of static graph-theoretic representations....

Digital tools are increasingly used in media studies, opening up new perspectives for research and analysis, while creating new problems at the same time. In this volume, international media scholars and computer scientists present their projects, varying from powerful film-historical databases to automatic video analysis software, discussing their...

This article presents a SIFT-based object recognition method that avoids the typical problems of time-consuming code-book generation and curse of dimensionality in feature comparison. The first problem is solved by using an alphabet of completely synthetic feature vectors. The second problem is solved by using the Hamming-distance on binarised SIFT...