ABSTRACT
Both the complexity of manufacturing environments as well as the complexity of tasks to be solved are growing continuously. In many manufacturing scenarios, traditional centralized and hierarchical approaches applied to production control, planning and scheduling, supply chain management, and manufacturing and business solutions in general are not adequate and can fail because of the insufficient means to cope with the high degree of complexity and practical requirements for
generality
and
reconfigurability
. These issues naturally lead to a development of new manufacturing architectures and solutions based
on the consideration of highly distributed, autonomous, and efficiently cooperating units integrated by the plug-and-play approach. This trend of application of multi-agent systems (MAS) techniques is clearly visible at all levels of manufacturing and business. On the lowest, real-time level, where these units are tightly linked with the physical manufacturing hardware, we refer to them as
holons
or
holonic agents
[1].
