Smart Data & Knowledge Services

In the Cognitive Social Simulation team, we focus on modelling and simulation of humans or AI-systems as part of processes and systems. Humans and AI-systems as active elements enrich processes with their individual knowledge, specific expertise, individual decision-making, and their interaction with other process participants or AI systems. Furthermore, we take individual motivation and goal systems into account. Therefore, we use cognitive social simulation to combine insights from distributed AI, psychology, and sociology in order to reproduce and analyze both social behavior and the cognitive decision-making of humans by means of AI. By means of cognitive social simulation, for example, socio-digital work and process organization of humans and AI-systems becomes designable.

Cognitive social simulation offers great potential for the need- or demand-oriented development of services or regulations. In urban development, cognitive social simulation in conjunction with smart cities can open up a new approach to the development and evaluation, for example, mobility concepts or infection control measures.
The method of cognitive social simulation is also highly relevant in production and logistics: In the design of processes and systems in the digitalized world, the role of humans and the division of labor and interaction between humans and machines are being redefined. In previous simulation and planning systems, the “human factor” is only insufficiently taken into account. Challenges from practice are illustrated by the following questions: “How can humans be included as customers or service providers in planning processes of digitized services?” and “How can a socio-digital division of functions between humans, AI and machines be optimized?”. In this context, the integration of the “Internet of Things” and the “Internet of Services” plays an important role for the development of new fields of work and for the transformation of modern production, which is discussed as “Industry 4.0” and “Smart Service World”.

Selected Research Topics:

• Cognitive Social Simulation
• Modeling of human behavior and social interaction
• Modeling and simulation of production and logistics systems
• (Distributed) planning and optimization
• Digital twins of smart cities
• Dynamic work organization, e.g. qualification management, process and role design

Selected Projects:

• Cockpit for regional pandemic management with agent-based social simulation – AScore (BMBF)
• Simulation-based Evolution and Evaluation of Vaccination Strategies in COVID-19-pandemics – SEEVacs (Land RLP)
• SoSAD – Social Simulation for Analysis of Infectious Disease Control
• HealthcAIre (Land RLP)
• Simulation of Nudging Methods to Strengthen the Independence of People in Need of Care – SiNuS (BMBF)
• Adaptive process and role design in organizations – AdaptPro (DFG)