Smart enterprise: Multi-agent solution for holonic enterprise resource management

Abstract

Holonic enterprises are considered as one of the new types of networking organizations used to increase business efficiency. In practice this requires to introduce a new type of management stimulating the “interpreneurial” approach, active interaction between actors to make coordinated and effective decisions on resource allocation, both within the individual project team and between the teams. In this paper we propose the concept of holonic enterprise based on the principles of leadership management and describe the multi-agent system for supporting decision making to maximize productivity of knowledge based resources. The system is called “Smart Enterprise” and combines top-down project planning with real time on-line bottom-up communication with employees. This provides more coordinated, flexible and efficient resource scheduling in case of unexpected events, which are an inevitable reality when the environment changes. The functionality and architecture of Smart Enterprise system is described, and its usage of ontology and multi-agent technology is presented.