A Goal-Based Approach for the Holonification of Holonic Multi-Agent Systems

Holonic structures are a hierarchical formation of holons that are developed and used for the purpose of restricting interaction domains, reducing uncertainty, or forming the high level goals of multi-agent systems, in such a way that the system benefits a high degree of flexibility and dynamism in response to environmental changes.
Although the holonic multi-agent systems are extensively used in modeling and solving complex problems, most of its prerequisites, like forming the body holons and dynamically controlling its structure, use very simple application-specific models. This is due to the immaturity of the research literatures in this field. In this article, an endeavor is made to propose a goal-based approach for the formation of holonic structures, using the concepts in social science and organizational theory. The use of concepts like role, skill, and goal structures, makes the proposed method possible to be used in wide range of applications.
In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the method and also the way it can be applied in real world problems, a test bed based on the application of wireless sensor networks in object tracking is designed and presented. In this application, the sensors, which are distributed in the environment as simple agents, using holonic structures, are responsible for the track of any alien objects that enter and move in the environment. According to the empirical results of the simulations, the proposed holonic approach has provided successful performance in terms of tracking quality and energy consumption of the sensors.