Holonic Execution: A BDI Approach (Studies in Computational Intelligence) (Studies in Computational Intelligence)

This research book presents a conceptual model for Holonic Manufacturing Execution that draws together research threads from both holonics and multi-agent systems. In holonics, we found the notion of a holon as an entity being both a whole in itself and part of a larger system, and in multi-agent systems, we found the modelling approach of expressing software behaviour in terms of Beliefs, Desires and Intentions. The conceptual model brings focus to the execution facet of Holonic Manufacturing, and forms a bridge between the areas of planning / scheduling and control; the areas of predominant concerns in the past decade of active research on Holonic Manufacturing. We present the model by mapping it onto two current BDI programming frameworks, and use this for two separate implementations of an execution systems for an industrial strength robotic assembly cell. This work also introduces the Team Programming paradigm, which is something of interest to the wider complex systems community as a new paradigm f or complex systems development.