Author: Melanie Schranz

Using swarm Intelligence to tackle the resource slack crisis at the edge

July 31, 2025
Posted by Melanie Schranz

Modern edge computing faces a silent efficiency killer: resource waste. Traditional orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes often rely on conservative, rule-based scheduling where applications overestimate their CPU and RAM needs. This leads to significant “slack resources”—allocated capacity that sits idle while other tasks wait in queues. The Horizon Europe project ACES is tackling this challenge through a novel, self-organizing local decision mechanism inspired by the natural world. A multi-agent approach to…

Redefining distributed knowledge and data management

February 6, 2025
Posted by Melanie Schranz

The evolution of the edge-to-cloud continuum brings transformative potential, but also significant hurdles in distributed data management. The European project ACES is addressing these challenges through a cognitive-by-design methodology, moving beyond simple data storage toward active knowledge interpretation. A core innovation in ACES is the introduction of a resource pool, which presents a significant shift from current edge definitions. By leveraging technologies like CXL and PCIe switches, the system can…

Talk “Unlocking Nature’s secrets”

October 31, 2024
Posted by Melanie Schranz

Melanie Schranz, senior researcher and project leader at LAkeside Labs, headlined a Discover-US webinar, delivering her presentation Unlocking Nature’s Secrets: Engineering Cyber-Physical Systems with Swarm Intelligence. The session is available on the YouTube channel HiPEAC TV. From biological inspiration to cyber-physical reality The presentation took the audience on a journey from observing natural phenomena—such as the foraging of ants, the coordination of bee colonies, and the flocking of birds—to the…

Swarm intelligence in the factory

July 2, 2024
Posted by Melanie Schranz

Modern semiconductor production is a operating at huge complexity, often involving over 1,500 products moving through 300 processing steps across 1,200 different machines. Traditional centralized scheduling methods frequently fail to optimize these NP-hard environments in real-time. To address this, the SwarmIn project leverages Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithms to create a self-organizing, bottom-up scheduling system. Unlike standard scheduling that calculates a global plan from the top down, the SwarmIn approach…

Robots inspect ship hulls

July 29, 2020
Posted by Melanie Schranz

The objective of the European project BugWright2 is to develop and demonstrate an adaptable autonomous robotic solution for servicing ship outer hulls. By combining the capabilities of autonomous micro air vehicles and small autonomous underwater vehicles, with teams of magnetic-wheeled crawlers operating directly on the surface of the structure, the inspection and cleaning system will be able to seamlessly merge the acquisition of a global overview of the structure with…