Habilitation Kolloquium

Tuesday, July 08, 2025 at 01.00 p.m. – @ B02.2.05, Lakeside Park Klagenfurt

Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Melanie Schranz Bsc. | Lakeside Labs GmbH

Abstract: Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, inspired by natural phenomena like bee hives and ant colonies. This approach demonstrates that numerous small entities can collaboratively solve complex problems more effectively than a single large entity. The talk will explore the fundamental principles of swarm intelligence and bottom-up system design. Melanie Schranz from Lakeside Labs, Austria, will present their current research focusing on agent-based modeling and swarm-inspired algorithms. This bottom-up approach leverages the benefits of nature-inspired swarms, including robustness, adaptivity, and scalability. Their work aims to develop local, highly reactive rules for solving complex problems, like we have in production process optimization, but also in the edge-fog-cloud continuum.

Bio: Dr Melanie Schranz is a senior researcher and project lead at Lakeside Labs, specializing in the study of swarm intelligence and agent-based systems. With a PhD in information technology, her work focuses on developing decentralized algorithms for the coordination of autonomous cyber-physical systems of any kind, inspired by natural swarm phenomena like observable in ant colonies and bird flocks. Dr Schranz has contributed extensively to the field through numerous publications in high-impact journals and conferences, and her research has been pivotal in advancing practical applications of swarm in areas such as swarm robotics, bottom-up optimization in production processes or resource allocation in the edge-fog-cloud computing. She actively collaborates with academic and industrial partners, leading innovative projects that bridge the gap between theoretical research and real-world implementations.