AGENT TECHNOLOGY FOR VIRTUAL ORGANIZATIONS Vladimir Marik Department of Cybernetics. Czech Technical University in Prague. Czech Republic & Rockwell Automation Research Center. Americka 22. 12000 Prague. CZECH REPUBLIC. marik@labe.felk.cvut.cz Michal Pechoucek Department of Cybernetics. Czech Technical University in Prague. CZECH REPUBLIC pechouc@labe.felk.cvut.cz The paper summarizes the latest achievements in the area of intelligent agent-based solutions for manufacturing. The main idea of this paper is that many solutions developed in the multi-agent area can be successfully rellsed for the virtual enterprise purposes. Critical analysis of both the MAS advantages and gaps frol/l the VO point of view is presented. 1. INTRODUCTION Both the complexity of the environment where we live and operate as well as the complexity of tasks to be solved is growing rapidly. In many situations, the centralized and hierarchically organized decision-making and solutions are not adequate and fail just because of complexity of tasks to be solved and requirements to be put on these tasks. To overcome the complexity barrier, it is quite natural to consider sets of autonomous, efficiently cooperating units being easily integrated by the "plug-and- play" approach instead of the rigid, centralized architectures. This is a clearly visible trend on all the levels of manufacturing and businesses. On the real-time level where these units are tightly physically linked to the manufacturing hardware we talk about holons and holonic solutions; intelligent agents are helping to solve the production planning and scheduling tasks on the workshop and plant levels. The vision of internet-based cooperation among enterprises has lead to the idea of virtual enterprises: "A virtual enterprise is a temporary alliance of enterprises that come together to share skills or core competencies and resources in order to better respond to business opportunities, and whose cooperation is supported by computer networks." (Camarinha-Matos & Afsarmanesh, 1999). The philosophical background of all these approaches is the same: efficient coordination and cooperation among autonomous intelligent goal-oriented units can lead to a quite effective behavior of the community as a whole. Knowledge stored and applied locally provides interesting and useful patterns of emergent behavior. L. M. Camarinha-Matos et al. (eds.), Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004