This paper focuses on the dynamic re-configuration and task optimization of holonic manufacturing systems (HMS). The concept of dynamic virtual clustering is extended to the control process of a holarchy or holonic organization. A task-oriented clustering mechanism and a corresponding optimization algorithm are presented as an efficient approach to the holonic control in the HMS domain. The med...

This paper introduces a new generation of Automated Guided Vehicles, called IPSI® AGVs, which are evaluated in the operations of a Container Terminal. The objective is to identify number of automated guided vehicles and cassettes required in order to that a number of cranes will not be idle during ship loading and unloading operations. A protocol called Contract Net is evaluated in the coordina...

This paper presents a system designed for task allocation, staff management and decision support in a large enterprise, in which permanent staff and contractors work alongside under the overall management of a manager to handle tasks initiated by end-users. The process of allocating a new task to a worker is modeled under different situations, taking into account user requirements as well as th...

An electronic contract signing protocol is a fair exchange protocol where the parties exchange their signature on a contract. Some contract signing protocols have been presented, and usually they come with an informal analysis. In this paper we use Colored Petri Nets to formally verify the fairness and the resistance to five previously described attacks of FPH contract signing protocol. We have...

Optimistic contract signing protocols allow two parties to commit to a previously agreed upon contract, relying on a third party to abort or connrm the contract if needed. These protocols are relatively subtle, since there may be interactions between the subprotocols used for normal signing without the third party, aborting the protocol through the third party, or requesting connrmation from th...

The Code Contracts project [3] at Microsoft Research enables programmers on the .NET platform to author specifications in existing languages such as C# and VisualBasic. To take advantage of these specifications, we provide tools for documentation generation, runtime contract checking, and static contract verification. This talk details the overall approach of the static contract checker and exa...

A multi-party contract signing protocol allows a set of participants to exchange messages with each other with a view to arriving in a state in which each of them has a pre-agreed contract text signed by all the others. “Optimistic” such protocols allow parties to sign a contract initially without involving a trusted third party T . If all signers are honest and messages are not arbitrarily del...

So far most distributed scheduling systems have been designed for cooperative agents and are inappropriate for self interested agents which exist for exam ple in inter rm interactions such as virtual enterprises This paper discusses issues that arise in extending the Contract Net Protocol to operate among such self interested agents whose rationality is bounded by combinatorial complex ity The ...

The contract net protocol has been developed to specify problem-solving communication and control for nodes in a distributed problem solver. Task distribution is'affected by a negotiation process, a discussion carried on between nodes with tasks to be executed and nodes that may be able to execute those tasks. We present the specification of the protocol and demonstrate its use in the solution ...