Distributed Control Applications: Guidelines, Design Patterns, and Application Examples with the IEC 61499 discusses the IEC 61499 reference architecture for distributed and reconfigurable control and its adoption by industry. The book provides design patterns, application guidelines, and rules for designing distributed control applications based on the IEC 61499 reference model. Moreover, examples from various industrial domains and laboratory environments are introduced and explored.

The research of holonic and agent-based systems is developing very rapidly. The community around this R&D topic is also growing fast - despite the fact that the real-life practical implementations of such systems are still surprisingly rare. H- ever, the managers in different branches of industry feel that the holonic and agent-based systems represent the only way of managing and controlling very c- plex, highly distributed systems exploring vast volumes of accumulated knowledge. The relevant research and development activities gain more and more visible support from both industry as well as public sectors. Quite naturally, the number of scientific events aimed at the subject field is also growing rapidly. We see new lines of conf- ences like INDIN, we observe a strong focus of the already well-established conferences, e. g. , INCOM or ETFA, being shifted toward holonic and agent-based manufacturing systems. We see an increased interest of the IEEE System, Man and Cybernetics Society, especially its Technical Committee on Distributed Intelligent Systems which leverages the experience gathered by the members of the former Ho- nic Manufacuting Systems (HMS) consortium. We see a clear orientation of the IEEE SMC Transactions, part C, toward applications of agent-oriented solutions. The same is true of the International Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS). This is a really good sign of the increasing importance of the field.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Industrial Applications of Holonic and Multi-Agent Systems, HoloMAS 2017, held in Lyon, France, in August 2017. The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: scheduling; knowledge engineering; modeling, simulation and reconfiguration; energy systems;and MAS in various areas.