Modeling Complex Systems by Multi-agent Holarchies

Abstract

Arthur Koestler (1967, 1969, 1978) introduced into science the concepts of a “holon” and of a “holarchy”. A holarchy is according to A. Koestler a tree-like hierarchy where the nodes of the tree – the components of the hierarchy – are autonomous intelligent acting I/O systems.

Koestler calls such components “holons”. Holarchies provide according to Koestler the appropriate conceptual framework for modeling and simulation of self organizing open hierarchical systems as they can be found in biology, medicine, sociology and management science. Especially he was interested to use holarchies for modeling the function of the human brain. In the past years artificial intelligence developed the topic of agent systems. Agents are intelligent acting systems which are able to perform certain tasks in an autonomous way. For the user agents are usually invisible. In case that agents are information processing systems their realization can be done in software (software agents). The elaboration of agent methodology led to the concept of a “multi-agent”, a network of cooperating agents (e.g. J. Ferber 1999). Agents have a conceptual similarity to the holons of A. Koestler. It seems to be natural to try to make use of the available agent technology to construct a network of systems which constitute a holarchy in the sense of A. Koestler. We call such system a Multi-Agent Holarchy.

In this paper we try to make a first step towards such an investigation. Besides of the work of Koestler and the existing models for multi-agent systems we base our paper here on earlier work of this author (Pichler 1995, 1999).