A Formal Holonic Framework with Proved Self-Organizing Capabilities

Numerous works aim to design agents and multi-agent systems architectures in order to enable cooperation and coordination between agents. Most of them use organizational structures or societies metaphor to define the MAS architecture. It seems improbable that a rigid unscalable organization could handle a real world problem, so it is interesting to provide agents with abilities to self-organize according to problem’s objectives and environment dynamics. We have chosen the holonic paradigm to provide these abilities to agents. Holons are recursive self-similar entities which are organized in an emergent society an holarchy. The aim of this paper is to present a formally specified framework for holonic MAS which allows agents to self-organize. The framework is illustrated by an example drawn from a real world problem. Some pertinent properties concerning the self-organizing capabilities of this framework are then proved.