The Federated Collaborative Networks (FCN) is a research group led by Prof. Dr. Hamideh Afsarmanesh at the Informatics Institute of the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam. The group is established in 1990, and was formerly called COLNET.
Mission
Today’s society has a socio-technical structure, operated by systems
that primarily consist of collectives of heterogeneous technical
components and autonomous actors. To compete and survive, these
collectives engage their components in flexible evolving networks
wherein they function and collaborate toward achieving their common
goals. Units such as individuals, organizations, and intelligent devices
constitute the actors in such Collaborative Adaptive Systems (CAS),
which may involve different temporal and spatial scales. Typically the
boundaries of a CAS are fluid, though in specific cases a CAS may
involve only tightly-tangled nodes and may choose to operate as a
closed-border network. Furthermore, the life time of a CAS relies on
achieving its common goals, and thus while CASs are usually temporary,
in certain cases they may become permanent.
Our mission is to develop high-level models to study collaborative
interactions within distributed CAS. We address design, development, and
operating principles of CAS, with challenges including collaboration
process definition based on competencies, reference modeling and
analysis, engineering agent and collective behavior based on exchanged
commitments and agreements, data/service composition infrastructures,
intelligent decision support, and consensus on common perceptions for
valuation and reward/sanction.
Research at the FCN group is strategically concentrated on the following four themes:
- Formalization and analysis of CNs and their reference modeling,
- Information/knowledge fusion and interoperability,
- Service digitization/integration frameworks, and
- Algorithms for learning and decision support in CNs.
