Low-volume high-variety products like personalized cars or customized engines will be the key issues for manufacturing in the 21st century. The necessary control technology is based on the concept of holons, which are the units of production and behave as autonomous and cooperative agents, providing flexibility, adaptability, agility, and dynamic reconfigurability. This book presents the latest research results in agent-based manufacturing as carried out by researchers in academia and industry within the international "Holonic Manufacturing Systems" project. As this project was driven by...

This is the first international conference aimed at bringing the distributed database and distributed AI (DAD experts together, from both academia and industry, in order to discuss the issues of the next generation of knowledge based systems, namely Cooperating Knowledge Based Systems or CKBS for short. As the area of CKBS is new, we intended it to be an ideas conference - a conference where interesting new ideas, rather than results from completed projects, are explored, discussed, and debated. The conference was organised by the DAKE Centre. This is an interdisciplinary centre at the...