FIPA-enabled holonic enterprise

In today's electronic economy the only chance for prosperity is to exploit optimally the emerging technologies based on which a new kind of infrastructure facilitates strategic partnerships among cyber-highway enabled participants. This paper merges latest results obtained by the Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) Consortium with latest developed standards for platform interoperability released by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) to propose a novel e-business model: the holonic enterprise. Including the e-marketplace and e-factory as submodels this new paradigm links the three levels of a global collaborative organization (inter-enterprise; intra-enterprise and machine level) to build a web-centric ecosystem partnering in which the workflow is harmoniously managed We identify several patterns of holonic collaboration and throughout the paper identify their particularities at each level. The holonic enterprise extends both the HMS and FIPA models. On one side it extends the holonic manufacturing paradigm with one top level, the inter-enterprise one. On the other side it extends the multi-agent system (MAS) paradigm to the hardware (physical machine) level.