Autonomic Control and Management in Heterogeneous Networks

Welcome at the research group for Autonomous Control and Management in Heterogeneous Networks.

My group is situated at the Chair for Network Architectures and Services at the Technische Universität München.

Below you find a short introduction to the vision we are currently working on. If you are interested in the topic, want to cooperate with me as a researcher, student or industry partner please contact me. If you have any questions, comments or just want to get in touch please feel also free to leave a message.

As you can see, scientific details concerning our research, demonstrations of the technology, the people working here, open positions/ thesis topics, my teaching activities as well as other interesting topics can be found in the menu on the left.

Enjoy your visit!

Marc-Oliver Pahl (head of group)    

...the vision we are working on

The amount of technical equipment in our direct surrounding raises every day. Temperature- (e.g. for the heater), movement- (e.g. for switching the lights), light- (e.g. for switching the lights only at night), sound- (e.g. switching by clapping) and touch sensors (e.g. buttons) are everywhere around us.

The small or not so small devices hardly work together. Communication only happens in vendor specific protocols for special purposes like controlling the room temperature. Cooperation in the sense of sharing the work hardly ever happens.
The potential of the electronic devices in our ambience is not exploited.

Imagine the possibilities arising when everything is able to interact: we can write applications that orchestrate our home taking into regard all the existing sensors as well as being able to control and manage every appliance. This leads to phantastic new possibilities including energy saving by really switching off all consumers inside the house when leaving, much higher comofrt in living thru assistants that are now able to support their master more than ever as they are at no additional cost as the already installed sensors are used. The economization is also to be explicitly named here as the use of our technology saves vendors from developing own communication protocols and standards for management applications as well as it leads to synergy by using the existing equipment and control software vendor comprehensive. The argument that vendors do not want that as they want to sell their own products does not totally hold true as often the product range does not include all kinds of sensors and especially in housing spaces it is not wanted to install so many sensors as it requires wiring and energy and it looks ugly.

We are currently working on an Autonomous Control and Management Platform (ACMP). The platform introduces distributed autonomous control and management into device clouds.

One thing the platform does is enabling all devices with a communication interface to be remotely controlled. It also provides a unified data model as well as autonomic knowledge distribution mechanisms. With the help of the platform all devices inside a common network can act together.

Through the abstraction our platform provides it is possible to provide standard services for control an management tasks that orchestrate devices vendor comprehensively. This opens an entirely new market of selling software "butler" services serving tasks like "additional energy saver", "disco light for your living room", "mood adopter", etc.

Our platform can also be used for distributed cotroling of energy consumers as the German energy providers are currently planning to launch in order to better adopt the energy production to the needs of the customers and saving a lot of money by that. The customer on the other hand could also load energy saving services like we have seen with the low cost routing for telephony. As such a service will be able to know and control the energy consumption inside the living space of the owner, it can actively control the consume as well as chose the current energy provider and thereby save the customers money as well.

These are only some applications one can think of. The sky is the limit...