Ruben Stranders

I am a Research Fellow in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity Research Group in the School Electronics of Computer Science at the University of Southampton funded by an EPSRC PhD Plus Fellowship.

I completed my PhD under the supervision of Nick Jennings and Alex Rogers, as part of the multi-disciplinary ALADDIN project, which was funded by BAE Systems and EPSRC. My thesis Decentralised Coordination of Information Gathering Agents focused on ways of coordinating teams of information gathering agents (such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and networks of wireless sensors) to maximise the quality of situational awareness—the ability to understand the impact of events on the objectives that exist within their environment, both now and in the future. To achieve this, I developed a wide range of new decentralised coordination algorithms that allow these information gathering agents to operate autonomously and in a purely decentralised fashion (so no central controller or human operator is required) making them robust to events in their hostile environments. These algorithms, which are also applicable to general multi-agent systems, are published in leading conferences and journals.

My current research focuses on the further development of these decentralised coordination algorithms, and their application to the Smart Grid.