This chapter presents some of the issues with holonic manufacturing systems. It starts by presenting the current manufacturing scenario and trends and then provides some background information on the holonic concept and its application to manufacturing. The current limitations and future trends of manufacturing suggest more autonomous and distributed organisations for manufacturing systems; hol...

The flexible architecture provided by holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) poses challenges in planning and control of production processes. The challenges are due, in part, to the loosely coupled structure of holons and also to the complex interactions among holons. Development of new methodologies is required to optimize the holonic processes in HMS to achieve the objectives. In this paper, we...

Large scale networks such as computational Grid promise a distributed computing infrastructure that can provide globally available network resources. Their size and complexity continue to increase and permit an almost ubiquitous availability of resources; users access to network resources irrespective to their location. These distributed systems need to be highly flexible, self-organizing and a...

Distributed manufacturing control systems, like holonic control systems, are difficult to apprehend and to design, due to the presence of many autonomous, concurrent and asynchronous activities. A formal specification methodology allowing to understand and to synthesize the system specifications and to validate the correctness of their models would play a key role in its design and later in its...

Properly architected holonic systems can enhance the ability of each set of players in the industrial automation and control market to deliver added value by encapsulating, reusing and deploying their specialized intellectual property at succeedingly higher levels of integration. Such an architecture expands on the HMS concept of cooperation domains to include both low-level control (LLC) and h...

The constant domination of customer requirements has forced survival industries to become more and more agile. As a response to this necessity, the Holonic Manufacturing System (HMS) project proposed the principles of a re-configurable system constructed of autonomous and cooperative elements. The desired degree of response to market needs can be achieved exploring concepts from the holonic par...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been increasingly used in the context of remote sensing missions such as target search and tracking, mapping, or surveillance monitoring. In first part our paper we consider agent dynamics, network topologies, collective behaviors. The objective is to enable multiple UAVs collaborate toward a common goal, one would find setting. ...