Thomas ClemenHochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg | HAW · Department of Computer Science
Thomas Clemen
Prof. Dr.
About
71
Publications
16,389
Reads
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981
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Artificial Intelligence;
Multi-Agent Systems;
Digital Twin Technology;
Smart Sustainable Cities;
National Security;
Policy advisory
Additional affiliations
August 2019 - present
Position
- Professor (Associate)
Description
- School of Life Sciences and Bio Engineering (LiSBE)
April 2011 - April 2015
Federal Scientific Advisory Board on Civil Defense and Disaster Protection
Position
- National Security & German-USA Cooperation
September 2009 - present
Position
- Professor (Full)
Description
- The Multi-Agent Research & Simulation (MARS) Group at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences is a multi-disciplinary team of students and scientists who work in the field of complex systems and decision-support information systems.
Education
January 1997 - November 1999
October 1987 - July 1993
Publications
Publications (71)
Understanding individual mobility in larger cities is an important success factor for future smart cities. Related simulation scenarios incorporate enormous numbers of agents, with the disadvantage of long run times. In order to provide large-scale and multimodal traffic simulations, we developed MARS V3. Adapting the Modeling and Simulation as a S...
Software agents have gained increasing attention in the field of creating digital twins of physical, biological, and human entities. The processing of sensory inputs, individual perception, and the selection of suitable actions are essential processes in here, and agent-based frameworks can be utilized for supporting the design, the implementation,...
Conservation areas, like national parks, are hotspots of social-ecological and social-economic activities. The resulting interactions contribute to an inherent complexity of these systems, making simulation models a vital form of support for their management activities. These models are often unimodal, i.e., limited by design to only one particular...
An intelligent combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and approaches to modeling and simulation is one of the most challenging endeavors for future cities, manufacturing industries, and predictive maintenance. Digital Twins take on a unique role here. However, the question of what a Digital Twin is and what differentiates it from a regular mod...
Multi-agent-based modelling and simulation provides an adequate environment to study the real world. This paper presents the use of a multi-agent research and simulation (MARS) framework and model design based on the overview, design concepts, design (ODD) protocol to model and simulate small-scale management strategies that are important for incre...
The study sought to review the works of literature on agent-based modeling and the influence of climatic and environmental factors on disease outbreak, transmission, and surveillance. Thus, drawing the influence of environmental variables such as vegetation index, households, mosquito habitats, breeding sites, and climatic variables including preci...
A digital twin of Hamburg's traffic patterns as an analysis tool for epidemiological questions, using the example of the spread of viruses via public transport
Understanding the dynamics of tree species and their demography is necessary for predicting future developments in savanna ecosystems. In this contribution, elephant-tree and firewood collector-tree interactions are compared using a multiagent model. To investigate these dynamics, we compared three different tree species in two plots. The first plo...
Agent-based models provide detailed, bottom-up approaches to investigate complex socio-ecological systems. This study presents a first step towards a modular agent-based simulation that is based upon empirical data, as well as environmental suitability maps and an assessment of livestock units. To illustrate the capabilities of our simulation, we u...
Models can provide valuable decision support in the ongoing effort to create a sustainable
and effective modality mix in urban settings. Modern transportation infrastructures must meaningfully combine public transport with other mobility initiatives such as shared and on-demand systems.
The increase of options and possibilities in multi-modal trave...
Poultry health is imperative for the continued growth of poultry and increased production. Environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, and ammonia gas have an impact on poultry health. They affect the respiratory system and eventually cause death. In Tanzania, most smallholder farmers use charcoal and kerosene stoves to control the envi...
The current trend towards living in big cities contributes to an increased demand for efficient and sustainable space and resource allocation in urban environments. This leads to enormous pressure for resource minimization in city planning. One pillar of efficient city management is a smart intermodal traffic system. Planning and organizing the var...
Multi-agent simulations are an upcoming trend to deal with the urgent need to predict complex situations as they arise in many real-life areas, such as disaster or traffic management. Such simulations require large amounts of heterogeneous data ranging from spatio-temporal to standard object properties. This and the increasing demand for large scal...
This paper describes a highly scalable mobility multi-agent simulation platform with its major case study in the city of Hamburg. By using and automatically integrating different open and administrative data sources for the greater Hamburg area, we have built a Digital Twin of the city representing the variety set of environmental features, to prov...
Peer-to-peer learning paradigm is seldom used in studying how farmers can increase yield. In this article, agent-based modelling has been applied to study the chances of dairy farmers increasing annual milk yield by learning better farming strategies from each other. Two sets of strategies were considered; in one set (S), each farmer agent would po...
berbewirtschaftung, Verbuschung und Klimawandel-Was geschieht mit den Bäumen in der Savanne Südafrikas? Ergebnisse einer Agenten-basierten Modellierung des Savannen-Ökosystems in zwei verschiedenen Nutzungsformen Lenfers, U. A.; Glake, D.; Ocker, F.; Clemen, T. Zusammenfassung: Bäume in der Savanne werden in hohem Maße von Tieren und Menschen genut...
Tag collision problems are a major issue affecting the performance of RFID systems. The probabilistic tag anti-collision algorithm has tag starvation and cannot identify some tags. This paper proposes a deterministic dual-stack query tree algorithm (DDQT). It successfully implements the anti-collision algorithm of tags by generating new query codes...
Southern Africa is particularly sensitive to climate change, due to both ecological and socio-economic factors, with rural land users among the most vulnerable groups. The provision of information to support climate-relevant decision-making requires an understanding of the projected impacts of change and complex feedbacks within the local ecosystem...
Die Analyse von geographischen Daten, insbesondere von Straßennetzwerken ist für Stadtplaner und Entscheider von großer Bedeutung. Um Veränderungen in der Stadtentwicklung zu planen, werden häufig Verkehrssimulationen eingesetzt, die zunehmend durch Multi-Agenten Modelle realisiert werden. Die daraus resultierenden Analysemöglichkeiten auf Graphen,...
Trees in savanna ecosystems are highly used by animals and humans. In this study, we compare the different effects of elephant utilization and firewood collector preferences for Sclerocarya birrea (Marula), Senegalia nigrescens (Acacia nigrescens), and Combretum apiculatum.
The potential distribution and, therefore, the structure of the savanna ec...
Our poster presented at the 4th South African National Conference on Global Change 2018 presents the main themes of the EMSAfrica project.
Southern Africa is particularly sensitive to climate change due to both ecological and socioeconomic factors. Rapidly growing population and threats to the sustainability of ecosystem service delivery at local,...
How do different human groups act and interact in the same social-ecological system? Multi-agent modelling and simulation (MAMS) can help to find out. A key element of human modelling is how agents plan their behaviour. Goal-oriented action planning (GOAP) allows agents to adapt their behaviour in relation to their own setup, personal traits and th...
Due to the fact that the South Africa’s savanna landscapes are under changing conditions, the previously sustainable firewood collection system in rural areas has become a social-ecological factor in questions about landscape management. While the resilience of savannas in national parks such as Kruger National Park (KNP) in South Africa has been w...
A wide conceptual and operational gap exists between models on a smaller scale, e.g. for leaf physiology, and models that are intended to cover whole regions or even continents like digital vegetation models. Environmental management demands a cross-scale approach due to the complexity of social-ecological interactions between individuals and their...
Comparing the past, current, and potential future distribution of indicator tree species is important for detecting biodiversity shifts, in particular in the light of global climate change. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the main factors affecting the distribution of those species is necessary. Because of the complexity of the underlying sy...
Currently, almost every modelling- or simulation-based research project starts from scratch. Thus, arduous tasks like setting up the infrastructure, including necessary environmental data such as GIS data, are often repeated. An additional problem is obtaining the necessary hardware to support the rapid realization of simulation results, especially...
The resilience of savanna ecosystems to climate and land-use changes is an important ecological and management question. The term ‘resilience’ is used to refer to the ability of a tree species to survive in a specific location, even under changing environmental conditions. In this study, vectors of functional traits of selected savanna tree species...
When running complex and large-scale multi agent simulations, the result preparation and presentation is of high importance to make efficient use of the generated data. In addition to conventional visual analytics dashboards, many use-cases could also benefit from 3D visualization approaches – especially when dealing with spatial-related simulation...
The development of simulation models confronts scientists with the necessity of transforming their concepts from theoretical models to executable code. Albeit modern simulation platforms provide APIs to abstract away a lot of technology, this task remains complex. Therefore a model-to-code transformation is essential, allowing domain experts to foc...
A comparison of the current and potential distributions of selected tree species, e.g. Sclerocarya birrea (Marula) could potentially be used to detect shifting species distributions, which will become increasingly important in the light of global climate change. A thorough understanding of the main factors affecting the potential distributions of i...
There is an increasing demand for very large-scale agent-based models. High numbers of individual entities and complex interactions between them require new ways of modeling and simulation. The creation of a distributed simulation model imposes a major challenge in the fields of network communication and coordination to the developer. Integrating m...
In vielen größeren Forschungsprojekten nehmen Simulationsmodelle eine integrierende Rolle ein. Einerseits fließen die Erkenntnisse der anderen Arbeitsgruppen als Wissensessenz ein, andererseits stellen sie ein " vorzeigbares " Produkt gegenüber den Geldgebern und Anwendern dar. Problematisch dabei ist, dass viele Modellinhalte erst gegen Ende des P...
Resilience management goes beyond risk management to address the complexities of large integrated systems and the uncertainty of future threats, especially those associated with climate change. T he human body is resilient in its ability to persevere through infections or trauma. Even through severe disease, critical life functions are sustained an...
The growing interconnectedness of ecological, social, and political systems poses a challenge in modeling them. Individual Based Modeling (IBM) has proven to be a useful tool in these areas. As the field becomes more developed and the number and size of available models increases, new problems arise. Application scenarios become huge in size, numbe...
Entwicklungsländer sind die anfälligsten Gebiete für den Klimawandel und klimabedingte Extremereignisse. Um klimatische Veränderungen wie Temperatur, Niederschlag und der damit verbundenen Wasserarmut sowie verstärkten Hochwasserereignissen zu identifizieren, können spatial gemischte Indikatoren zur Erstellung von sogenannten Hotspots herangezogen...
When large numbers of people gather in public spaces such as stadiums, railway stations, shopping centers and concert halls there is an increased risk of mass emergence and disasters. Critical situations could possibly be prevented with appropriate tools to anticipate them. WALK is a modular designed crowd evacuation simulation system using a multi...
The German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance categorises potential hazards, which could arise for inhabitants of Germany (BBK, 2006). They share a common trait: a huge number of persons would be affected by the concrete situation. The responsible management organisations would have an urgent need for better forecasts of hum...
For the wider range of IPCC emissions scenarios, the Earth ‘s mean surface temperature is projected to warm 1,4 to 5,8 degrees by the end of the 21st century. As one of the few concrete outcomes of COP15, it is indicated that forests conservation can provide climate change adaptation and generate benefits based on CDM funding for communities in dev...
Ecological simulation models represent parts of highly complex and frequently nonlinear systems. The temporal scale of a model describes levels of characteristic behavior of the underlying ecological processes. They are observable by periodically appearances of specific patterns within time series. Because of its global transformation properties an...
Wavelet-based validation of ecological models (in German)
Environmental assessment and management studies have to attach more importance to the complex interactions within and between ecosystems. Since environmental information systems have to support the processing of simulation scenarios, the integration of simulation models is sufficiently important. But, the interconnection of ecological models demand...
Although environmental information systems have become very popular, the use of simulation models within such systems has not increased at the same rate. Mostly, new and specialized models will be implemented rather than integrating existing ones. This mainly results from the absence of helpful documentations and knowledge about the admissible spat...
The paper presents a new dynamic model for the interception of rainfall in a beech forest (WiMo) which considers the influence of wind upon canopy storage capacity. The canopy interception capacity was calculated by an optimization technique from a 17-month data set from a 97-year-old beech forest (Asperulo-Fagetum) in Northern Germany. A compariso...
Projects
Projects (7)
The ESIDA research network aims to connect skills, methods and data objects from different research disciplines and information sources in order to design new strategies of data-driven health information and surveillance systems for early detection and control of infectious disease outbreaks in Sub-Saharan Africa. The project builds upon previous networks of German and African partners and aims to strengthen international cross-disciplinary collaboration in research and education, involving clinical research, epidemiology, public health, biosecurity, environmental sciences, data and computer sciences. Its long-term goal is to expand the German-African network and scientific exchange to strengthen Infectious Diseases Surveillance in Sub-Saharan Africa.
ESIDA Research Field and Expertise:
Epidemiological Surveillance, Epidemiology and Statistical Methods, Public Health, Biosecurity, Environmental Sciences, Ecology, Data and Computer Science
ESIDA Research Interests:
Extension and / or application of ESIDA
Joins three powerful paradigms from systems theory and computer science and operationalize it within the MARS framework. We offer international and interdisciplinary short courses.
EMSAfrica focuses on the combined impacts and ecosystem feedbacks of climate change and human land management in Southern Africa. Our approach combines different scientific disciplines and multi-scale measurements from single plants to ecosystems. Our network of research clusters along an aridity gradient represents various degrees of land-use intensity. Our ultimate aim is to integrate scientific information into combined and upscalable models, that are relevant to land-use management.