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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Another two years have passed from the last HoloMAS conference held in Linz
in 2009. It is a pleasure to say that the R&D activities around holonic and
multi-agent systems for industrial applications have not faded during this period.
On the contrary, the number of scientific events aimed at the subject field
is growing steadily. Besides HoloMAS, which has been the pioneering event in
this field, there are multiple conferences such as the IEEE Conference on Industrial
Informatics (INDIN), the IEEE Conference on Emergent Technologies
and Factory Automation (ETFA) or the IFAC Symposium on Information Control
Problems in Manufacturing (INCOM) that aim their attention at advanced
industrial automation systems based on intelligent agents.
This year’s conference was the eighth in the sequence of HoloMAS events. The
first three (HoloMAS 2000 in Greenwich, HoloMAS 2001 in Munich and Holo-
MAS 2002 in Aix-en-Provence) were organized as workshops under the umbrella
of DEXA association. Starting with 2003, HoloMAS became an independent
conference organized biyearly on the odd years, still under the DEXA patronage
(HoloMAS 2003 in Prague, HoloMAS 2005 in Copenhagen, HoloMAS 2007 in Regensburg
and HoloMAS 2009 in Linz). On the even years the attention is focused
on specific events: the IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems (DIS
2006) with a special track covering the “obvious”HoloMAS topics was organized
in Prague in June 2006. Similarly, the IEEE Conference on Distributed Human–
Machine Systems (DHMS 2008), which has absorbed the HoloMAS field, was
held in Athens, Greece, in March 2008, and the IFAC Workshop on Intelligent
Manufacturing Systems (IMS 2010) in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2010. This approach
allows the HoloMAS community to be better integrated with both the information
society-oriented DEXA community as well as the IEEE Society aimed at
human–machine systems, cybernetics, and industrial informatics.
The research of holonic and agent-based systems receives constant support
from both the public sector and private institutions. There is an increased interest
from the IEEE System, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) Society, namely,
from its Technical Committee on Distributed Intelligent Systems, which leverages
the experience gained in the former Holonic Manufacturing Systems consortium.
Another IEEE body - the Industrial Electronics Society - supports
the related R&D field through its Technical Committee on Industrial Agents
(http://tcia.ieee-ies.org/). Its mission is to provide a base for researchers and
application practitioners, to share their experiences with applications of holonic
and agent technologies in the industrial sector, especially in assembly and process
control, planning and scheduling, and supply chain managements. There
are number of impacted journals that provide space for articles dealing with industrial
agents such as the IEEE Transactions on SMC, Part C: Applications and Reviews, Journal of Engineering of Artificial Intelligence Applications (EAAI),
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, Computers in Industry or the
Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS). Let us
recall that the extended versions of selected best HoloMAS 2009 papers were
published in the special issue of the International Journal of Production
Research.
It is our pleasure to inform you that for HoloMAS 2011 there were 36 papers
submitted, from which the ProgramCommittee selected 25 papers to be included
in this volume, by authors from 13 countries all over the world. Among the key
trends that the accepted papers report on is the effort to shift the holonic/agentbased
control system from the personal computer (the prevalent hosting platform
in the past) closer to the “hardware.” The obvious reason is to increase even
more the distributiveness and thus the robustness and flexibility of the control
system. In this model the control application is designed as embedded software
running on a dedicated microcontroller. This brings new challenges related to
limited resources in terms of memory, processing power, battery life, etc. Related
topics discussed in this volume are the employment of simulation techniques for
modeling, designing and validating the control system prior to its deployment
on the real hardware. The boom in Web applications and smart mobile devices
like smart phones and tablets have recently drawn the attention of the industrial
sector as it brings new challenges and possibilities for building next–generation
user interfaces for SCADA and operator panels. Looking at the applications of
holonic and agent systems we collected quite an interesting portfolio this year,
including smart grids, supply chain and logistics, healthcare, mobile robots and
unmanned aerial vehicles.
There were two invited talks specifically targeted toward HoloMAS 2011:
• Peter Skobelev (Magenta Solutions): “Multi-agent Systems for Real-Time
Resource Allocation, Scheduling, Optimization and Controlling”
• Alois Zoitl (Vienna University of Technology): “A Control Architecture for
Self-Reconfigurable Production Systems”
Also, for the first time in the HoloMAS history, there was a special session
organized covering the topic of smart industrial systems.
The HoloMAS 2011 conference was a highly motivating environment, challenging
the future research and fostering integration in the subject field. It has
always served as a showcase of the holonic and agent-based manufacturing research
offering information on the state of the art to specialists in neighboring,
knowledge-processing research fields covered by the DEXA multi-conference
event. We are very grateful to the DEXA Association for providing us with this
excellent opportunity. We would like to express our many thanks to Gabriela
Wagner for all her organizational efforts which were of key importance for the
success of this event. We would like to thank the IEEE SMC Society, and especially the Technical
Committee on Distributed Intelligent Systems of this Society, for its technical
co-sponsorship.
Description
Keywords
Holonic systems Multi-agent systems
Citation
Marik, Vladimir Vrba, Pavel Leitão, Paulo (Eds.) (2011). Holonic and multi-agent systems for manufacturing: proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems. 6867. ISBN 978-3-642-23180-3