The Intelligent / Distributed Enterprise Automation (iDEA) Laboratory is a unit of the School of Engineering Science at Simon Fraser University, located on Burnaby mountain in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Simon Fraser University is a research university, with more than 25,000 students and over 100 programs. SFU has received wide acclaim in recent years, in particular, for being ranked #1 in the Comprehensive category by Macleans Magazine for three consecutive years.
Under the direction of Prof. William A. Gruver, students and staff in the iDEA Laboratory conduct research in intelligent agent and holonic systems with applications to manufacturing systems and supply chains, robotic systems, and infrastructure systems for energy, transportation, and security. The core research topics for these systems include agent architectures, agent intelligence, agent communications, agent collaboration, agent simulation and optimization, and agent human-machine interfaces.
Students and staff of the iDEA Laboratory benefit from extensive research interaction with companies, laboratories, and universities in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, and the United States, and through international participation with the IEEE SMC Technical Committee on Distributed Intelligent Systems.