SARC 2008

Holonic multi-agent systems are pyramidal systems whose only strict obligation is that pyramidal structure, and in which robustness and cooperation between the autonomous agents are the key issues. Robustness lets them cope with perturbations, faults and hard constraints — typically a self-organisation problem, answered by regenerating faulty agents, generating new ones or migrating agents between systems. Cooperation means that agents with their own goals and strategies must collectively lead the system to its global goal, by locally and autonomously modifying their roles and behaviours — a self-adaptation property. SARC set out to bring together researchers from information technologies and from holonic manufacturing systems on exactly these two properties. The first edition was held at the Second IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, which ran in Venice 20–24 October 2008.

• Holonic multi-agent systems
• Fault-recovery in holonic multi-agent systems
• Models of cooperation and coordination for autonomous holonic agents
• Predicting and controlling emergence of behavior in holonic multi-agent systems
• Self-adaptation of roles and/or services in holonic multi-agent systems
• Delegation tasks, reconfiguration tasks in holonic multi-agent systems
• Self-organization of pyramidal-structured holonic multi-agent systems
• Case studies showing self-adaptation or self-organization in holonic multi-agent systems
• Models of self-management for holonic multi-agent systems
• Models and meta-models of self-organizing holonic multi-agent systems
• Models and meta-models for hybrid multi-agent systems