History: Fields of Activity

In conjunction with the degree program Applied computer science, established as a supplement to the traditional subject Computer science at the University of Dortmund, the Chair of Systems Analysis (Lehrstuhl für Systemanalyse, Ls11) was founded in 1985. Professor Hans-Paul Schwefel was holder of the chair from the beginning until his retirement in February 2006. From 1993 to 2003, Professor Wolfgang Banzhaf joined the team, representing the field of Foundations and applications of computer science in engineering. The position of Prof. Schwefel could be refilled prematurely in December 2004. Chairperson is now Professor Petra Mutzel, and her subject is Algorithm engineering instead of systems analysis. Additionally, Professor Günter Rudolph represents the field Computational intelligence since April 2005.

Since 1985, international interest in artificial neural nets, fuzzy systems, and evolutionary algorithms has increased substantially. Together, these topics now form the important new field of computational intelligence (CI) or natural computing within the computer sciences - more than three decades after the first ideas emerged. One reason for the delay is the fact that only recently the computing power has become available for solving many practical problems by means of those methods, especially since more and more parallel computers and local networks of workstations can be used to exploit the inherent parallelism of the CI methods.

The Systems analysis research group at Dortmund has been working in the fields of evolutionary and related fields for an extended period of time. The international acknowledgment of that work has led to the establishment of a collaborative research centre Design and management of complex technical processes and systems by means of computational intelligence methods (SFB 531) at the University of Dortmund. It has been financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) since its inception at the beginning of 1997. The use of parallel computers has a long tradition here, documented by the participation in several national and European initiatives.

Here you find some basic information about the research interests at this chair:

More information about our recent activities may be found in the biennial reports, known as "Blaues Heft (blue booklet)".
The latest report concerning the period 2004-2006 is available in English or German.

Reports about past periods may be found on our downloads page.

Get a survey of the chair's present hardware and software equipment.