An organisational approach to engineer emergence within holarchies

An open issue in self-organization is how to engineer emergent behaviors. This issue is also of interest for engineering holonic multi-agent systems as any level of a holarchy is dependant of the emergent behaviors of its sub-levels. In order to tackle this specific feature of holonic multiagent systems, the capacity concept which abstracts a know-how from its concrete realization is introduced. The use of this concept is illustrated in this paper through a case study using the aspecs development process which enables the analysis, design, implementation and deployment of holonic multi-agent systems and integrates the capacity as a core concept of it’s underlying metamodel, called CRIO (i.e Capacity-Role-Interaction-