HOLOMAS'00: industrial applications of holonic and multi-agent systems

An increasing complexity of intelligent manufacturing systems as well as the overall demands on flexible and fault-tolerant control of production processes stimulates development of two pillar, emerging technologies that will soon make an important breakthrough in the field of intelligent manufacturing and control. These two paradigms are the event-driven control strategy, typical for holonic systems, and the distributed information processing resulting in the multi-agent systems. The research communities working in both fields approach the problem of intelligent manufacturing from different viewpoints and nearly independently. They use their specific terminology and techniques. The holonic system (HS) community is rooted in the concept of holons as presented by Koestler and is strongly driven by the requirements of industrial control. The community is well organised around the international HMS (Holonic Manufacturing Systems) consortium. On the other hand, comparatively much larger and more diverse community of researchers working in the multiagent system (MAS) area, is influenced by the ideas of highly distributed computing in computer networks as well as by the ideas of distributed artificial intelligence. As the community is much more heterogeneous, there are different organisational frameworks where the researchers are grouped. The European MAS researchers are organised in the AgentLink consortium, worldwide in IFMAS (International Foundation for MAS), Agent Society and FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) with an emphasis on industrial standards. The unifying principles of the multi-agent paradigm have been clearly specified only recently.