Holonic Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) stand out as a particularly suitable paradigm for designing complex systems. Its elementary constituents are termed “agents”, that is software entities which exhibit autonomous and flexible behaviours. However, most widely used models still consider agents as atomic entities. This may be a problem for MAS dedicated to the study and simulation of complex systems that frequently exhibit hierarchical structures. Indeed, almost all proposals for agent architectures have not addressed the general problem of treating collections of “agents” as higher-order entities, for example by treating organisations as agents. This chapter focuses on the definition of Holonic Multi-Agent Systems (HMAS) which are a special type of MAS based on the concept of “holon”. Holons are self-similar entities that represent whole-part constructs and can be viewed either as higher-level system components or as wholes composed of other holons as substructures. Furthermore, a framework for engineering HMAS based on organisational concepts is introduced.

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