From Simulation to Implementation - An overview of the Brahms Research and its application to Work Practice Analysis and Software Agents (slides - PDF)

Presenter: Maarten Sierhuis, Senior Research Scientist, NASA Ames

Abstract: Brahms is a multiagent modeling and simulation environment for simulating organizations at the work practice level. Brahms was originally developed to model work at the practice level, which means we include a holistic model of the collaborative work of people, machines and places. In this talk I will give an overview of the current Brahms research at NASA. I will describe three projects in which we apply the Brahms environment to understand the work of people on space missions, i.e. how people work onboard the ISS, and on Mars, as well as missions operations of a remote robotic mission to Mars. I will then describe a fourth project in which we are applying Brahms to develop a multiagent software architecture in which software agents (developed in Brahms) help to support astronauts and robots on EVAs, on a planetary surface (e.g. Mars)

Bio: Maarten is a Senior Research Scientist at RIACS, an institute of the Universities Space Research Association. He leads the Brahms Project at NASA Ames Research Center, Computational Sciences Division, since 1998. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Science and Informatics from the University of Amsterdam and an Engineering degree in Informatics from the Polytechnic University of The Hague, The Netherlands. His current research interest is in modeling and simulating work practices in human organizations, and multiagent systems, as it relates to the development of human-centered systems.