Distributed intelligent systems: technologies and applications

This presentation provides an overview of the technologies and applications of distributed intelligent systems that have been developed by the author, his students, and his colleagues in cooperation with industry, partners of the Holonic Manufacturing Systems Consortium (http://hms.ifw.uni-hannover.de), a major international project of the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Program (W.A. Gruver et al., 2003), and members of the Distributed Intelligent Systems Technical Committee of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (http://www.ieeesmc.org). Intelligent distributed systems are based on the use of cooperative agents, organized in hardware or software components, that each independently handle a small set of specialized tasks and cooperate to achieve system-level goals and provide a high degree of flexibility. Many applications have an inherent structure that naturally lends itself to either a multi-agent or holonic design