Specialised Agent Applications

Abstract

With the ever growing usage of the world wide IT networks, agent technologies and multiagent systems (MAS) are attracting more and more attention. (Multi-)Agent technologies aim at the design of agents that perform well in environments that are not necessarily well-structured and benevolent. This article tries to give an overview over MAS applications. However, because of the lack of space and time it is not possible to make this overview comprehensive in any sense. We therefore concentrate on the application of MAS in the context of supply chain management in virtual enterprises. Additionally, we give pointers to related work and general literature for application-oriented research of MAS. In MAS applications emergent system behaviour is one of the most interesting phenomena one can investigate. However, there is more to MAS design than the interaction between a number of agents. For an effective system behaviour we need structure and organisation. To achieve this we present the concept of holonic multiagent systems and demonstrated how it can be utilised in the selected application domain.