because of high speed, efficiency, robustness and flexibility of multi-agent systems, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in the art of these systems. in competitive multi agent systems, a mechanism is required via which the agents can come to reach an agreement.  contract net protocols are one of the well-known negotiation protocols in multi-agent systems. in contract net pro...

A multi-agent system consists of a group of interacting autonomous agents. The key problem in such a system is coordination and cooperation, i.e. how to ensure that individual decisions of the agents result in jointly optimal decisions for the overall system. This problem becomes even more serious when the number of the agents is large. Holonic model is an effective method to manage large scale...

In Industrial Maintenance Company (IMC) a vast number of entities interact and the global behaviour of this system is made of several emergent phenomena resulting from these interactions. The characteristics of this system have increased both in size and complexity and are expected to be distributed, open and highly dynamic. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are well adapted to handle this type of syst...

A multiagent system (MAS) consists of a collection of individual agents, each of which displays a certain amount of autonomy with respect to its actions and perception of a domain. Overall computation is achieved by autonomous computation within each agent and by communication among the agents. The capability of the resulting MAS is an emergent functionality that may surpass the capabilities of...

We present a mechanism for collaboration and coordination amongst agents in multi-agent societies seeking social equity. This mechanism allows to compute egalitarian allocations of indivisible resources to agents, reached via progressive revisions of social consensus. Egalitarian allocations are allocations with maximal egalitarian social welfare, where the egalitarian social welfare is given b...

Holonic multiagent systems (HMAS) offers a promising software engineering approach for developing complex open software systems. However the process of building MultiAgent Systems (MAS) and HMAS is mostly different from the process of building more traditional software systems and it introduces new design and development challenges. This paper introduces an agent-oriented software process for e...

Self-organization has been investigated for long in a very broad range of areas. However, only till recently has self-managing and self-organizing computing received intensive attention. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of important basic problems of selfmanaging and self-organizing computing, including the essence of self-managing computing, generic architecture of computing, real ...

Nowadays, industrials are seeking for models and methods that are not only able to provide efficient overall production performance, but also for reactive systems facing a growing set of unpredicted events. One important research activity in that field focuses on holonic/multi-agent control systems that couple predictive/proactive and reactive mechanisms into agents/holons. Meanwhile, not enoug...

This reports gives an extensive review of the holonic manufacturing systems literature in 2004. After a brief introduction of holonic principles and concepts, a full rationale of holonic systems in manufacturing is given. In particular, an argument is developed that holonic manufacturing systems provide greater agility than their current industrially adopted counterparts. The body of the review...

aphasia diagnosis is a challenging medical diagnostic task due to the linguistic uncertainty and vagueness, large number of measurements with imprecision, inconsistencies in the definition of aphasic syndromes, natural diversity and subjectivity in test objects as well as in options of experts who diagnose the disease. in this paper we present a new self-organized multi agent system that diagno...