This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems, HoloMAS 2013, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in August 2013, in conjunction with DEXA 2013. The 25 revised full papers presented together with two invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: MAS in automation and manufacturing; design, simulation and validation; MAS in transportation systems; industrial applications; and new trends.
The increasing complexity of manufacturing systems as well as the overall demands for flexible and fault-tolerant control of production processes stimulates (among many others) two key emerging technologies that are already making an important breakthrough in the field of intelligent manufacturing, control, and diagnostics. These two paradigms are: • the holonic approach based on the event-driven control strategy, usually aimed at modular control systems that are directly physically linked with the manufacturing hardware equipment, and • the multi-agent approach developed in the area of distributed information processing. The research communities working in both these fields are approaching the problem of intelligent manufacturing from different viewpoints and, until recently, to a certain extent, in an independent way. We can however observe quite a clear convergence of these fields in the last few years: the communities have started to cooperate, joining efforts to solve the painful problems involved in achieving effective industrial practice. We can see convergence in the terminology, standards and methods being applied.
The 14th DEXA 2003 International Conference on Database and Expert - stems Applications was held during September 1–5, 2003 at the Czech Technical UniversityinPrague, CzechRepublic. TheDEXAlineofconferenceshasalready gained its own reputation and respected position as a platform for the exchange of ideas among theoreticians and practitioners in the wider area of computer science, but mainly in the areas of database and knowledge-based technologies. Since DEXA 1993, which was held in Prague, DEXA has grown into a m- ticonference consisting of four more focused and specialized conferences besides DEXA itself, namely the DaWak conference, EC-Web conference, eGOV c- ference, and this year happening for the ? rst time, the HoloMAS conference. In addition, the DEXA workshop is a special event o? ering enough space for specialized discussion, and acting – in a certain sense – as an incubator for new conferences. The DEXA conference itself is growing in volume and quality each year. This time there were 236 papers submitted and reviewed and the program committee selected 91 of the best papers to be included in this volume. Each of the subm- ted papers was carefully reviewed by at least three independent PC members or external reviewers. The DEXA proceedings quite clearly re? ect the current trends in the da- base area and we are happy with the balanced content of both the conference and the proceedings.
