The application of ZEUS agents in manufacturing environments

The concept of holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) is the key to meet future demands of highly dynamic production environments. A hierarchy of holons, which are autonomous and cooperative entities, represents the internal structure of a HMS, where software agents embody the intelligent nuclei of holons. The paper deals with the implementation of a multi-agent system with ZEUS, an open source, JAVA ^TM-based, agent building toolkit from British Telecom. Our application is based on a job shop scheduling problem, where task allocation is achieved through negotiation between cooperating agents. Moreover, we focus on the interaction with legacy software