Reference architecture for holonic manufacturing systems: PROSA
Computers in Industry - Special issue on manufacturing systems
Representation and reasoning for goals in BDI agents
ACSC '02 Proceedings of the twenty-fifth Australasian conference on Computer science - Volume 4
Towards Socially Sophisticated BDI Agents
ICMAS '00 Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on MultiAgent Systems (ICMAS-2000)
Multiagent Systems for Manufacturing Control
Multiagent Systems for Manufacturing Control
The AARIA agent architecture: From manufacturing requirements to agent-based system design
Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering
Environments for multiagent systems state-of-the-art and research challenges
E4MAS'04 Proceedings of the First international conference on Environments for Multi-Agent Systems
Goal representation for BDI agent systems
ProMAS'04 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Programming Multi-Agent Systems
E Pluribus Unum: Polyagent and Delegate MAS Architectures
Multi-Agent-Based Simulation VIII
Prediction Horizons in Agent Models
Engineering Environment-Mediated Multi-Agent Systems
A reference architecture for situated multiagent systems
E4MAS'06 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Environments for multi-agent systems III
Hybrid multi-agent systems: integrating swarming and BDI agents
ESOA'06 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Engineering self-organising systems
Architecture-centric software development of situated multiagent systems
ESAW'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Engineering societies in the agents world VII
MAS-DisCoSim 4 PDP: a testbed for multi-agent solutions to PDPs
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1 - Volume 1
Delegate MAS patterns for large-scale distributed coordination and control applications
Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs
The control of myopic behavior in semi-heterarchical production systems: A holonic framework
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Maintaining a distributed symbiotic relationship using delegate multiagent systems
Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
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One large and quite interesting family of MAS applications is characterized (1) by their large scale in terms of number of agents and physical distribution, (2) by their very dynamic nature and (3) by their complex functional and non-functional requirements. This family includes a.o. manufacturing control, traffic control and web service coordination. BDI-based agent architectures have proven their usefulness in building MASs for complex systems - their explicit attention for coping with dynamic environments is one obvious explanation for this. For the family of applications mentioned above, the complexity of the software for the individual agents using traditional BDI-approaches, however, is overwhelming. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to BDI agents which alleviates agent complexity through so-called "delegate MASs", which use the environment and its resources to obtain BDI functionality. Delegate MASs consist of light-weight agents, which are issued either by resources for building and maintaining information on the environment, or by task agents in order to explore the options on behalf of the agents and to coordinate their intentions. We describe the approach, and validate it in a case study of manufacturing control. The evaluation in this case study shows the feasibility of the approach in coping with the large scale of the application and shows that the approach elegantly achieves flexibility in highly dynamic environments.