Vision

The Learning Agents Research Group at Erasmus is an interdisciplinary research group, located at the Rotterdam School of Management, spanning the fields of artificial intelligence, behavioural science, computer science, economics, information systems, operations research, and software engineering. The primary objective of the group is to research, develop, and apply autonomous intelligent agents to support human decision making capabilities in the area of business networks, electronic markets, and supply-chain management.

Modern business networks and markets are highly dynamic and exhibit a high degree of uncertainty. Under these conditions business managers are routinely faced with complex strategic, tactical, and operational decisions; decisions ranging from the macroscopic (i.e. which markets should we enter and when?) to the microscopic (i.e. which products should be packed on which pallet?). Within LARGE, we investigate how learning agents may be designed to support humans in these decision making processes. We define learning agents as software entities that carry out some set of operations on behalf of a user or another program with some degree of independence or autonomy, improve their performance from experience and in doing so employ some knowledge or representation of the user’s goals or needs.

LARGE’s long-term research goal is to create complete, robust, autonomous and mixed-initiative agents that can learn to interact with other intelligent agents (agents representing humans and humans directly) in a wide range of complex, dynamic environments. These agents must sense their environment, reason about the behaviours of other agents (both teammates and adversaries), engage in high-level cognitive decision making, and execute their actions in the environment. Most importantly agents need to improve their performance automatically over time.

LARGE contributes to new research and development in the areas of machine learning, autonomous agents and multiagent systems, supply-chain management, and agent-mediated marketplaces, and applies those techniques to solve business and economic problems. We perform interdisciplinary research on decision support tools and advanced technologies aimed at significantly enhancing the cognitive limitations of human decision makers and increasing enterprise supply chain performance.

If you are interested to join or sponsor a particular research group of LARGE please contact  Wolf Ketter.