The Holonic Enterprise as a Collaborative Information Ecosystem

In today’s e-conomy the only chance for prosperity is to exploit optimally the emerging technologies based on which a new kind of infrastructure facilitates strategic partnerships among cyberhighway enabled participants. This paper merges the latest results obtained by the Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) Consortium with the latest developed standards for platform interoperability released by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) to propose a novel e-business model: the Holonic E-nterprise. Including the e-marketplace and e-factory as sub-models, this new paradigm links the three levels of a global collaborative organization (inter-enterprise, intra-enterprise and machine level) to build a web-centric ecosystem partnering in which the workflow is harmoniously managed. After clarifying the proposed concept we define a mapping between holons and agents, introducing the concept of mediator. We identify several patterns of holonic collaboration and throughout the paper identify their particularities at each level. The Holonic Enterprise extends both the HMS and FIPA models. On one side it extends the holonic manufacturing paradigm with one top level, the interenterprise one. On the other side it extends the multi-agent system (MAS) paradigm to the hardware (physical machine) level.