On 24 April 2026, Prof. Sashko Ristov presented his habilitation plan at the Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck. The presentation took place as part of the Department’s Lunchtime Seminar which is intended as a forum for internal presentations of recently completed and ongoing research.

During the seminar, Prof. Ristov also disseminated recent results from the FLEXI project, with a key focus on FLORCA, a lightweight serverless runtime for the dynamic coordination of distributed applications. This work was recently accepted at 27th ACM International Middleware Conference, taking place from 14th to 18th December 2026 in Spain, and explores the use of negotiation scenarios in the context of energy systems.

Modern energy systems are no longer static pipelines. They increasingly involve decentralised actors, such as prosumers, batteries and electric vehicles, as well as dynamic decision-making and multi-round interactions between participants. These developments create a need for new coordination models that can adapt during execution.

With FLORCA, FLEXI contributes to this direction by moving towards a function-driven coordination model. In this model, functions can dynamically spawn new computations, exchange information during execution, and determine the next steps at runtime. This enables more flexible coordination in distributed applications and supports scenarios such as multi-round negotiation for energy resource owners.

With over 25 participants in attendance, the event provided a valuable opportunity to share the results of the FLEXI project with two key target audiences: the research community and students or early-career researchers.

Presenting FLEXI outcomes at an academic seminar strengthened awareness of the project’s research results, encouraged discussion with domain experts and supported knowledge transfer within the wider computer science community.