Open Access

Paulo Leitão, Stamatis Karnouskos, Armando Walter Colombo

• This chapter introduces the main conceptual foundations of multi-agent systems and holonic systems and presents the framing of industrial agents as an instantiation of such technological paradigms to face industrial requirements such as, for example, those posed by industrial cyber-physical systems (ICPS). It addresses the alignment of industrial agents with RAMI 4.0. The chapter also addresses the use of industrial agents to realize ICPS, to concretely enhance the functionalities provided by the asset administration shells (AAS). Holonic paradigm translates the Köstler's observations and Herbert Simon's theories into a set of appropriate concepts for distributed control systems. Along with the holonics principles, an industrial agent usually has an associated physical hardware counterpart, which increases the deployment complexity. On the one side, the AAS is designed to be available for both non-intelligent and intelligent digitalized assets, which is also a digital basis for autonomous components and systems.