Holonic Agent Research Articles

Distributed, Dynamic and Recursive Planning for Holonic Multi-Agent Systems: A Behavioural Model-Based Approach

In this work, we propose a new distributed, dynamic, and recursive planning approach able to consider the hierarchical nature of the holonic agent and the unpredictable evolution of its behaviour. For each new version of the holonic agent, introduced because of the agent members obtaining new roles to achieve new goals and adapt to the changing environment, the approach generates a new plan that can solve the new planning problem associated with this new version against which the plans, executed by the holonic agent, become obsolete. To do this, the approach starts by generating sub-plans capable of solving the planning subproblems associated with the groups of the holonic agent at its different levels. It then recursively links the sub-plans, according to their hierarchical and behavioural dependency, to obtain a global plan. To generate the sub-plans, the approach exploits the behavioural model of the holonic agent’s groups, thereby minimising the computation rate imposed by other multi-agent planning methods. In our work, we have used a concrete case to show and illustrate the usefulness of our approach.

Modeling a holonic agent based solution by Petri nets

One of the key design issues for distributed systems is to find proper planning and coordination mechanisms when knowledge and decision capabilities are spread along the system. This contribution refers holonic manufacturing execution systems and highlights the way a proper modeling method - Petri nets - makes evident certain problems that can appear when agents have to simultaneously treat more goals. According to holonic organization the planning phase is mainly dependent on finding an appropriate resource allocation mechanism. The type of weakness is established by means of the proposed Petri net models and further proved by simulation experiments. A solution to make the holonic scheme avoid a failure in resource allocation is mentioned, too.

Multi-Agent and Service Oriented Architectures for Intelligent Tutoring System Development

Multi-Agent and Service Oriented Architectures for Intelligent Tutoring System DevelopmentTraditional modular architecture of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) does not provide sufficient modularity of complex ITSs. Distributed technologies like services and agents are used to increase modularity of ITSs by implementing traditional modules as sets of services or agents. The paper describes holonic agent architecture that implements each module as one or more holonic agents. It uses the lessons learned from the multi-agent architecture to propose service oriented ITS architecture.