Special issue on multi-agent and holonic systems in manufacturing

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 forms, technologies, and solutions to increase their responsiveness and production efficiency. Current manufacturing systems are complex distributed environments that require collaboration between software, hardware, human, and organizational systems. It is crucial to keep a balance between the technical aspects of automation and the human and social facets when applying information technology in industrial applications; particularly with the rapid advancements in information and communication technologies (particularly Internetand Web-based technologies) and the wide deployment of automated manufacturing systems. However, creating appropriate frameworks for exploring the best synergies between humans and automated systems represents numerous issues in terms of processes characterization, modeling, and development of adequate support tools. A series of IFIP sponsored BASYS conferences— International Conferences on Information Technology for Balanced Automation Systems in Manufacturing and Services have been organized to promote the development of ‘‘balanced automation systems’’ in an attempt to address these issues. BASYS’06 was the 7th edition in its series and was held in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada on 4–6 September 2006. Its technical program consisted of three keynote papers and 49 regular papers organized in four focused tracks: multi-agent and holonic systems in manufacturing; networked enterprises; integrated design and assembly; and monitoring and control. This special issue consists of nine selected and expanded papers from BASYS’06, primarily based on the first track on multi-agent and holonic systems in manufacturing. These papers report on recent research and development efforts concerned with various aspects of implementing multi-agent and holonic systems in manufacturing: from physical device level control, production process planning and scheduling, process execution, to virtual enterprises (VEs) and supply chain management.