Multi Agent Systems and the Holonic Operating Systems

by Eamonn McCormick, Brian Lenane & Chi Lee



Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon states: "Empirically a large proportion of the complex systems we observe in nature exhibit hierarchic structure.On theoretical grounds we could expect complex systems to be hierarchies in a world in which complexity had to evolve from simplicity." Simon (1996)"




The academic area of multi agent based system has been a rich field for research and development. It has been influenced by some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century such as Herbert Simon. However the field has failed so far to make a huge impact on the world of technology. This situation is about to change as the world evolves towards machine networks. The evolutionary arch of technology tends to develop from simple to more complex forms. As we now are building a huge network of inter connected devices with significant processing power, the age of agent based systems has arrived. However our belief is that to be successful we need to build an open "holonic" operating system to enable the rapid evolution of semi autonomous, secure and evolving agent based systems. We propose that while the agent based system could be built on any operating system, in order to be secure it makes sense to build the operating system on top of only a limited number of common operating systems such as Android. Part of the rationale for this is the need to build in operating system level security into the agent operating system to ensure privacy and security from sophisticated threats such as EndGame that can easily compromise systems such as McAffee etc..



There has been some very good work done across the world in the area of MAS - multi agent systems, Java spring, Android etc.. that provide us with most of the building blocks required for success. What is missing however is a clear vision of how to build such a holonic operating system that could operate both at the level of the "cloud" and at the level of the individual device. In 1967 Arthur Koestler coined the term holon as an attempt to conciliate holistic and reductionist visions of the world. A holon represents a part-whole construct that can be seen both as a component of a higher-level system and as a whole composed of other holons as substructures.



We fully concur with this analysis of what is required in an agent based system



"We adopted this approach because it is largely recognized in the agent research community that an MAS should be conceived in terms of an organized society of individuals in which each agent plays specific roles and interacts with other agents. As pointed out by Ferber, the organizational approach offers a number of advantages and can contribute to agent-oriented software development through heterogeneity of languages, modularity, multiple possible architectures and security of applications."
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