Acknowledgements

This book presents and concludes a major part of my research conducted from early 2007 until today. By far the greatest fraction of this time and, more importantly, the best of the presented ideas are strongly connected to the Institute AIFB where I worked as a research associate since December 2007. Here, my advisor Prof. Hartmut Schmeck gave me the opportunity to follow my research interests virtually limit-free in a creative and inspirational working environment, for which I am deeply grateful to him. I also thank him for his support and trust, even in difficult times, and for his constructive, detailed, often seemingly pedantic remarks which repeatedly led me to a better understanding of my own work.

However, as I will show in the book, any environment is inextricably linked with the agents acting in it, and this is particularly true of a working environment. Therefore, I am just as grateful to all my colleagues (former and current) for being so creative and inspirational, and for simply constituting an enjoyable company. In particular, I thank (in order of appearance) Sanaz Mostaghim, Ingo Paenke, Felix Vogel, Holger Prothmann, André Wiesner, Daniel Pathmaperuma, Christian Hirsch, Marc Mültin, Friederike Pfeiffer-Bohnen, Pradyumn Shukla, Micaela Wünsche, Fabian Rigoll, Fredy Rios and Marlon Braun for some of the most valuable (in very different ways) scientific discussions I ever had. Furthermore, I thank Ingo Mauser, Daniel Pathmaperuma, Friederike Pfeiffer-Bohnen and Felix Vogel for proofreading early, probably rather unpleasant versions of the manuscript.

Creating a doctoral thesis, including the many tasks it brings along, required the so far greatest effort of my life. This amount of work cannot be handled without being backed up in the “real world”.

I thank my old friends, who never stopped being there for me, sometimes in person, always in my mind, and my new friends, the best of whom emerged from being mere colleagues at first, for reminding me of life beyond work. I am greatly thankful to my parents for encouraging me in not being satisfied with common opinions (which may well have become my most noticeable character trait today), to my grandfather for revealing me the joy of exploring everything and telling it to everybody (i. e., research and teaching) and to my grandmother for reminding me of the importance of studying (i. e., life beyond amusement). I adore my wife for showing me – a computer scientist – the beauty of nature (which may have given the thesis an esoteric touch at one place or another). Finally, I am most notably grateful to my whole family (naturally referring to my own as well as my wife’s side) for supporting me in all those characteristic situations a PhD student gets into over time, and the few rather specific to myself.

Karlsruhe, December 2014

Lukas König

PS. Having little to do with the content of the book, I still cannot leave unmentioned an amazing contributing to a very special day: Thank you, little sister, for an exam celebration cake in the shape of my first computer – including an eatable Basic program.