Holonic manufacturing is a concept of considerable promise as it can provide the flexibility and responsiveness required by virtual enterprises. However, if this promise is to be realised, two key issues need to be addressed. First, migration strategies must be developed to enable existing manufacturing systems using conventional controller technology to progressively incorporate holonic manufa...

mobile-ad-hoc-networks (manets) are self-configuring networks of mobile nodes, which communicate through wireless links. the infrastructure of a mobile ad hoc network (manet) has no routers for routing, and all nodes must share the same routing protocol to assist each other when transmitting messages. the main issues in manets include the mobility of the network nodes, the scarcity of computati...

In the 80’s, Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) concept was adopted as a solution to all the problems in manufacturing. However, it was soon realized that the evolving demands for manufacturing systems were not handled by CIM. New alternatives rise, and especially Agent-Based Manufacturing and Holonic Manufacturing Systems, for cooping with today’s manufacturing systems requirements. From ...

With the growing usage of the world-wide ICT networks, agent technologies and multiagent systems are attracting more and more attention, as they perform well in environments that are not necessarily well-structured and benevolent. Looking at the problem solving capacity of multiagent systems, emergent system behaviour is one of the most interesting phenomena, however, there is more to multiagen...

The manufacturing system environment is typically a complex system, involving many variables and constraints, being in certain cases a chaotic system. The introduction of new paradigms to face globalisation, distribution of activities and customer satisfaction requirements, increases the problem complexity. The new manufacturing control approaches should support the agile adaptation to volatile...

Effective institutions are key to the success of self-governing systems, yet specifying and maintaining them can be challenging, especially in large-scale, highly dynamic and competitive contexts. Political economist Elinor Ostrom has studied the conventional arrangements for sustainable natural resource management and derived from these eight design principles for self-governing institutions. ...

ion step is not amenable to formal proof. However, it is possible to validate a specification by proving challenging theorems concerning properties that the specification is expected to exhibit. If correct, these theorems reinforce the specifier’s understanding of the specification and its relationship with the underlying Problem Domain. If not, the specification probably needs to be changed to...

Systems are becoming more and more complex. The properties of distribution are more and more important in systems for their identification, description, management, controlling, maintenance, knowledge, and intelligence. Applications of Distributed Intelligent Systems are emerging in more and more fields of industry. A distributed system is composed of many computers and devices interconnected w...

Merges the latest results obtained by the holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) consortium with the latest developed standards for platform interoperabilit y released by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) to propose a novel e-business model: the holonic e-enterprise (HE). The HE extends both the HMS and FIPA models. On one side it extends the holonic manufacturing paradigm with...

In the last decades significant changes in the manufacturing environment have been noticed: moving from a local economy towards a global economy, with markets asking for products with high quality at lower costs, highly customised and with short life cycle. In this environment, the manufacturing enterprises, to avoid the risk to lose competitiveness, search to answer more closely to the custome...