Scheduling is a basic activity in large scale systems with unexpected and
high complexity demands. Instances of these complex systems are found in
manufacturing, logistics, economics, traffic control, and biology. The number of
entities and their interconnections are the reasons motivate researchers to find solutions
which are not based on central control structures. Multi-agent based architecture is a
distributed collections of interacting entities which function without a supervisor. The
advantage of holonic self-organization concepts lies in the fact that they contribute to
achieve more efficient performance. According to these principles, several approaches
have been and are being designed, which are considered weak in handling emergency
demands in an industrial environment. The concepts of multi-agent and holonic
systems are addressed and discussed in this chapter where their advantages and weak
points are revealed with a focused in holonic control architecture in overcome the weak
points. The main objective of this architecture is to reduce time and complexity
overload. The concept of parallel processing and task priority are of concern here. Task
priority reduces time delay in an unexpected situation causes for handling critical tasks.
The techniques like self-organization methods, high percentage of autonomy for
controller holons, use of common data source, and increasing parallel processes are
applied in reducing output delivery time. This newly proposed architecture is tested in
a simulation environment.
Keywords: Holonic systems, Multi-agent systems, Parallel processing,
Scheduling, Self-organization, Task priority.
