Currently industrial automation systems are built using a hierarchical top-down approach, yielding tightly coupled and low flexibility systems. Holonic and intelligent agent-based industrial control systems have the potential to be much more highly robust and flexible systems with very loose coupling between subsystems. Despite this potential these systems are slow to be adopted by industry. Th...

Agent technology has been recognized as a promising paradigm for next generation manufacturing systems. Researchers have attempted to apply agent technology to manufacturing enterprise integration, enterprise collaboration (including supply chain management and virtual enterprises), manufacturing process planning and scheduling, shop floor control, and to holonic manufacturing as an implementat...

Holonic Multi-Agent Systems (HMAS) are a convenient and relevant way to analyze, model and simulate complex and open systems. Accurately simulate in real-time complex systems, where a great number of entities interact, requires extensive computational resources and often distribution of the simulation over various computers. A possible solution to these issues is multilevel simulation. This kin...

Holonic Multi-Agent Systems (HMAS) are a convenient and relevant way to analyze, model and simulate complex and open systems. Accurately simulate in real-time complex systems, where a great number of entities interact, requires extensive computational resources and often distribution of the simulation over various computers. A possible solution to these issues is multilevel simulation. This kin...

One of the current challenges of Service Oriented Engineering is to provide instruments for dealing with dynamic and unpredictable environments and changing user requirements. Traditional approaches based on static workflows provide little support for adapting at runtime the flow of activities. MUSA (Middleware for User-driven Service Adaptation) is a holonic multi-agent system for the self-ada...

Evolvable Production Systems differ from Reconfigurable and Holonic Manufacturing Systems by implying ontology-based process-specific modularity at fine granularity with local intelligence and a distributed control solution based on the Multi-Agent paradigm. Understanding the dynamics of such complex production systems is not feasible with traditional engineering. For creating the manufacturing...

The Holonic Packing Cell is a manufacturing environment that is responsive to change and has been constructed at the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) at Cambridge University. The development work on this cell is being done by the IfM’s Centre for Distributed Automation and Control with contributions from the Auto-ID Centre and Agent Oriented Software (AOS). The cell is geared towards experimen...

During the last decades many Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are developed to add adaptivity and intelligence to the e-learning systems. Intelligent agents and multi-agent systems are widely used to implement intelligent mechanisms for ITSs due to their characteristics. The paper presents an agent based ITS for the course “Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence” named MIPITS. The MIPITS sys...

Classical applications of control engineering and information and communication technology (ICT) in production and logistics are often done in a rigid, centralized and hierarchical way. These inflexible approaches are typically not able to cope with the complexities of the manufacturing environment, such as the instabilities, uncertainties and abrupt changes caused by internal and external dist...