Worldwide systems are increasingly growing into unprecedented complexity levels. This increase of system complexity has to be tackled with new control approaches, where decentralization is playing an important role and particularly the Multi-Agent Systems and Holonic Systems. Despite the benefits of this distribution, new problems arise such as the need for entities coordination. This paper pro...

Holonic Multi-Agent organisations are particular pyramidal organisations where agents of a layer (having the same coordinator) are able to communicate and to negotiate directly between them. Holonic agents are generally structured by services (for examples: to search information, to interact with the user). Some holonic agents, distributed in the system, can have same roles without being in a s...

OLOMAS’02 is the third workshop organized within the frame of the DEXA conference. The first two workshops (HOLOMAS’00 held in Greenwich, UK, HOLOMAS’01 in Munich) documented the imperative need in starting mutual communication and cooperation between two research communities who were at the time working in parallel without any deeper interaction. That is, the AI community aimed at multi-agent ...

Uncertainties are significant characteristics of today’s manufacturing systems. Holonic manufacturing systems are new paradigms to handle uncertainties and changes in manufacturing environments. Among many sources of uncertainties, failure prone machines are one of the most important ones. This paper focuses on handling machine failures in holonic manufacturing systems. Machine failure will red...

The manufacturing sector has been facing major challenges as it undergoes revolutionary changes fuelled by new and sophisticated demands from customers, global competition, distribution of manufacturing and marketing activities, and technological advances. In order to address these challenges, manufacturing enterprises need to change the way they do business and adopt innovative organizational ...

This paper presents first results for a theoretical foundation for emergency e-Logistics based on an extended FIPA-compliant layered multi-agent system architecture. The approach is based on the holonic paradigm proposed by A. Koestler in his attempt to create a model for self-organization in biological systems and proven by the HMS Consortium to be very useful for resource management and alloc...

this paper is concerned with the consensus tracking problem of high order mimo nonlinear multi-agent systems. the agents must follow a leader node in presence of unknown dynamics and uncertain external disturbances. the communication network topology of agents is assumed to be a fixed undirected graph. a distributed adaptive control method is proposed to solve the consensus problem utilizing re...

The paper explores some ideas on the maintenance of load equilibrium in a multi-agent manufacturing system, using concepts such as Temperature, Relative Heat and Latent Heat. The material presented here is based on work done as part of the international project on Holonic Manufacturing Systems. Furthermore, the paper investigates the nature of agent cooperation and examines whether a simple coo...