Holonic Systems as Software Paradigms for Industrial Automation and Environmental Monitoring

Holon is a powerful metaphor which captures the recursive structure of biological systems and the organization of their decision processes arranged at various granularity abstraction levels. From a computational intelligence perspective, a holon can be conceived as a goal-oriented community of lower-level holons led by more specific targets. Sub-holons co-operate on sub-problems that represent the source problem at a lower knowledge abstraction level. Such a (recursive) hierarchical organization constitutes the so-called holarchy. Holonic thinking is hence particularly suited for complex and intelligent systems modeling: in particular, its success has been proved in the field of Intelligent Manufacturing. Nevertheless, albeit hierarchical and granular thinking are two fundamental prerequisites in Software Engineering, the use of holonic thinking as software paradigm is still flawing in the literature at the moment. In this regard, the paper introduces the concept of ‘holonic granule’ as a novel software building-block for modeling complex granular systems. Prospective applications of holonic granule-based software models are then commented with particular emphasis to industrial automation and environmental monitoring settings.