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Observation and Control
of Collaborative Systems
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Goals / Ideas of the Project Observation and Control of Collaborative Systems (OCCS)

In Phase III the project will refine and extend concepts and tools for the design of distributed observer/controller architectures. These are necessary in order to design more complex and collaborative self-organising technical systems, which are at the same time safe, robust, and adaptive. In Phase I we have developed a generic observer/controller architecture, which allows for controlled self-organisation in technical scenarios. By observing and analysing the current state of the system under observation and control (SuOC), this architecture can be used to prevent unwanted emergent behaviours and to encourage or enforce the desired ones. A centralised observer/controller architecture was investigated in this context to validate and refine the resulting concepts and methods. In Phase II we focused on complex distributed scenarios. There, we refined the generic architecture into a distributed multilevel observer/controller architecture to support the control of complex self-organising and adaptive technical systems and investigated collective learning as part of the distributed controllers. In Phase III we will extend this systematic approach by refining components of the generic observer/controller architecture, not studied so far, and we will explore complex collaboration mechanisms. We will investigate metrics to quantify robustness and flexibility of OC systems, and we analyse and demonstrate systematically the improvements obtained. For validation purposes and for the demonstration of practical usability, we will develop selected multi-agent/multi-robot scenarios as testbeds. Moreover, we will apply our results to the distributed application "Organic Traffic Control", which will be developed in the corresponding project OTC3.