Message from the HoloMAS Workshop Chairs

OLOMAS’02 is the third workshop organized within the frame of the DEXA conference. The first two workshops (HOLOMAS’00 held in Greenwich, UK, HOLOMAS’01 in Munich) documented the imperative need in starting mutual communication and cooperation between two research communities who were at the time working in parallel without any deeper interaction. That is, the AI community aimed at multi-agent systems and the groups concentrated around the holonic manufacturing technology. These two workshops, and especially the post-workshop proceedings [1], [2] have helped to start more intensive, cross-community discussions and contributed to better mutual understanding of the standpoints of individual camps. The workshops helped to clarify the roles of holonic and multi-agent solutions in realtime control and non-real time decision making, to unify the terminology and in general to link both communities together. The idea of using function-block oriented IEC standards for the real-time control and the FIPA-based software agents for the higher-level decision making seems to be widely accepted. New holonic/agent architectures bridging the gap between both these control levels appeared, some of them are also reported in the workshop proceedings. From the implementation point of view, Java dominates on both the levels and seems to be one of the tools helping to solve the difficult migration problems when new highly distributed paradigms have to operate the legacy, centralized systems.