Hierarchical-granularity holonic modelling

Fostered by continuous technological development, distributed and pervasive computer systems applications have raised great interest in the recent literature. In the field of distributed applications, during the last two decades, particular attention has been paid by scholars and practitioners to the notion of software agents. This interest has promoted the growth of sophisticated architectures based on Multi Agent Systems. Multi Agent Systems design criteria are driven by the analysis and decomposition of the given context knowledge. Minor changes, either in the problem semantics or in the granularity level description, generally affect the architectural engineering design. This limit can be overcome in the view of a holistic approach employing the notion of holon. A holon is an agent endowed with special features. Seen from the outside, a holon behaves like an intelligent agent; seen from the inside, it appears to be decomposable into other holons. This property makes it natural to model the systems at different granularity levels by exploiting this intrinsic recursive structure. Nevertheless, in the literature of holonic-based systems, the problem of dealing with semantics at different levels has been assessed predominantly at an abstract level. In this work, a holonic model called Hierarchical-Granularity Holonic Model is presented as a knowledge-based solution to a number of multi-level application contexts. Starting from the renewed literature on the topic, a theoretical model is first introduced. Then, an architectural model is derived. Eventually, a customized application for the case study of distributed air quality monitoring systems is explained.