The research of holonic and agent-based systems is developing very rapidly. The community
around this R&D topic is also growing fast - despite the fact that the real-life practical
implementations of such systems are still surprisingly rare. H- ever the managers in different
branches of industry feel that the holonic and agent-based systems represent the only way of
managing and controlling very c- plex highly distributed systems exploring vast volumes of
accumulated knowledge. The relevant research and development activities gain more and more
visible support from both industry as well as public sectors. Quite naturally the number of
scientific events aimed at the subject field is also growing rapidly. We see new lines of conf-
ences like INDIN we observe a strong focus of the already well-established conferences e. g.
INCOM or ETFA being shifted toward holonic and agent-based manufacturing systems. We see an
increased interest of the IEEE System Man and Cybernetics Society especially its Technical
Committee on Distributed Intelligent Systems which leverages the experience gathered by the
members of the former Ho- nic Manufacuting Systems (HMS) consortium. We see a clear orientation
of the IEEE SMC Transactions part C toward applications of agent-oriented solutions. The same
is true of the International Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS).
This is a really good sign of the increasing importance of the field.
