News:

- Presentation slides of some papers are on-line - please scroll down

- Technical Program is available

- paper 21: "Zero Downtime Reconfiguration ..." has been schedulled for a different HoloMAS Session

- The list of accepted papers is published

- New deadline for paper submission: Mar. 10, 2007

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Accepted Papers:
The links to the presentation slides of some papers are provided below

28. Holonic Simulation of a Design System for Performance Analysis

AUTHORS: Richard Sohnius, Eyck Jentzsch, Wolf-Ekkehard Matzke

Presentation Slides
ABSTRACT: In this paper, we present our approach to assess the performance of an engineering design system in the field of microelectronics using a holonic simulation. Instead of measuring some input and output parameters of the system and applying some metrics to them as common performance assessment approaches do, we build a model of the entire system and simulate the course of the design process using a multi agent system. The performance metrics are then applied to the detailed results of this simulation. The main focus of this paper thereby lies in the simulation part of the approach which we designed to have two parts: a planning phase and an execution phase.

30. Towards Industrial Strength Business Performance Management

AUTHORS: Vadim Ermolayev, Wolf-Ekkehard Matzke

Presentation Slides (~2M)
ABSTRACT: Business performance management today does not possess a rigorous and grounded engineering methodology capable of delivering reliably measured values to backing up decision making. Much more it is the art of executive gurus who listen to their backbone experience and take their decisions using intuitive and heuristic approaches. This vagueness appears to be one of the main reasons for current dissatisfaction in industry. In this paper we express our vision of how a rigorous engineering methodology for business performance management in engineering design may look like. Our research work in PSI and PRODUKTIV projects strongly suggests that the underlying modeling framework has to be holonic. We consider that the solution has to: (i) be based on a sound Domain ontology of performance; (ii) use dynamic distributed planning technique and simulations to predict the performance of a design system; (iii) use the methodology which is sensitive to the specificities of a particular design system.

41. Applications of Virtual Reality in Design and Simulation of Holonic Manufacturing Systems: A Demonstration in Die Casting Industry

AUTHORS: Mert Bal, Majid Hashemipour

Presentation Slides (~0.7M)
ABSTRACT: This paper presents the concepts and the techniques of implementation of Virtual Reality (VR) - based simulations into the design of the Holonic Manufacturing Systems. An integrated methodology is presented, which has been developed for modelling and simulations of a manufacturing system with holonic control with the aid of VR. The main focus is given to the implementation in small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) using limited expertise and minimum costs. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method, an application in a medium-sized die-casting factory is presented. The overall performance of the factory has been tested for implementation of a robot-arm integrated die casting cell with holonic control architecture. In this regard, the best course of action for enterprise’s investment decisions has been investigated with the least disruption to existing production activities.

44. Ontology-Based Competence Management for Team Configuration

AUTHORS: Vladimir Tarasov, Thomas Albertsen, Alexey Kashevnik, Kurt Sandkuhl, Nikolay Shilov, Alexander Smirnov

Presentation Slides
ABSTRACT: When manufacturers, distributors and dealers need to collaborate, they form production networks because this provides significant advantages in production variety, flexibility and lead time. Production processes in such networks often spawn different specific tasks that are to be solved by the network members. This requires creation of a team able to tackle the identified problem. When dealing with multiple organizations and multiple processes within a complicated production network, trying to find a member that has required competence can be a laborious, time-consuming process. Developing and main-taining competence profiles of all the relevant parties associated with produc-tion can significantly reduce the time. The paper proposes an approach to team configuration based on competence profiles. The approach utilizes such tech-nologies as ontology management, context management and profiling. Using ontological representation makes it possible to identify those team members who are best suited for the task by ontology matching.

47. Resilience in the Face of Disaster: Accounting for Varying Disaster Magnitudes, Resource Topologies, and (Sub)Population Distributions in the PLAN C Emergency Planning Tool

AUTHORS: Giuseppe Narzisi, Joshua S. Mincer, Silas Smith, Bud Mishra

ABSTRACT: PLAN C, an Agent-Based Model platform for urban disaster simulation and emergency planning, features a variety of reality-based agents interacting on a realistic city map and can simulate the complex dynamics of emergency responses in different urban catastrophe scenarios. Work reported here focuses on the incorporation of specific subpopulations of person agents, reflecting the existence of individuals with specific defining characteristics and needs, and their interactions with the available resources. Performance of these subpopulations are compared in both point-source attack and distributed disaster scenarios for disasters of different magnitudes. The effect of varying topologies of available resources, i.e. different hospital maps, provides particular insight into the dynamics that can emerge in this complex system. PLAN C produces interesting emergent behavior which is often consistent with the literature on emergency medicine of previous events.

48. Information Agents Handling Semantic Data as an Extension to Process Monitoring Systems

AUTHORS: Teppo Pirttioja, Ilkka Seilonen, Antti Pakonen, Aarne Halme, Kari Koskinen

Presentation Slides
ABSTRACT: An approach to extend process monitoring with the help of information agents (IA) handling semantic data is presented in this paper. According to this approach an operator of a process automation system can configure monitoring tasks which a group of IAs perform proactively. The monitoring tasks are assumed to be composites which refer to several process observations and their logical relations. The purpose of these composite monitoring tasks is to enhance the work of the operator by letting him to supervise the process at a higher level of abstraction instead of following a large amount of simple measurement data. The monitoring agents operate as a multi-agent system consisting of agents with capabilities to combine both numerical and symbolic information from several data sources. The agents can setup and execute user configured monitoring tasks cooperatively. The approach is illustrated with test scenarios using data from an industrial paper making process.