It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in the 2nd ERRIC Workshop on Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing and Robotics, organized by the University Politehnica of Bucharest, the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science in collaboration with the French research network GDR MACS.

The Workshop is organized in the framework of the European FP7 Project ERRIC, the objective of which is to foster innovation in control of sustainable manufacturing and in this context to empower excellence in research in the faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science of the University Politehnica of Bucharest thus enhancing its national and regional leadership position in selected areas of Intelligent Information Technologies applied to manufacturing and robotics.

The theme of the Workshop is “Intelligent Information Technologies for service-oriented, sustainable manufacturing and robotics”.

Service orientation of technology and management applied to enterprise and robot systems have gained attention in the past years, promising a way to create the basis for enterprise agility so that companies can deliver new, more flexible business processes that harness the value of service approach from a customer's perspective.

Service-oriented approaches are used nowadays for developing applications and software-as-a-service that can be sourced as virtual hardware resources, including on-demand computing, interoperability across enterprise platforms and dynamic choreography of technologic and business processes.

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) for the manufacturing design, engineering, planning, robot integration, control and maintenance are not limited to just Web services, or technology and technical infrastructure either. Instead, they reflect a new way of thinking about processes that reinforce the value of commoditization, reuse, semantics and information, and create business value in a sustainable way.

The purpose of the Workshop, which is the second one from a series of future scientific events, is to shed light on multiple issues associate with service-oriented technologies and management in manufacturing enterprises and robot workstation, for sustainable and agile production considering the complete lifecycle of products.

The Workshop also analyses how Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Holonic Manufacturing Execution Systems (HMES) contribute together to global sustainable manufacturing by help of service orientation. SOA represents the basis for describing service access models of resources in distributed manufacturing control for batch planning, scheduling and operations control. MAS represent the main technology used to set up and maintain such a service model at shop floor level. This model, judiciously defined and used in real-time by the (holonic) manufacturing control system, may solve myopia in resource allocation from the point of view of both production cost and energy efficiency, thus contributing to sustainable manufacturing. On the other hand, HMES use detailed information about resource behaviour, performances and service capabilities to optimize globally (at batch level) or locally (at packet level) production.

Efficient HMES should switch between the hierarchical control mode - to provide optimality and the heterarchical control mode - to provide agility and fault-tolerance, triggered by a diversity of changes: (i) resource status or performance change; (ii) rush orders; (iii) accomplishment of limited power consumption programs. Manufacturing sustainability will be addressed in the session's papers with respect to: fault-tolerance to disturbances; energy efficiency at shop floor level; balancing resource usage; robot services makespan / cost efficiency; vision-based quality control of products.

Intelligent Information Technologies which will be presented in the Workshop provide solutions concerning the advanced control for Smarter Manufacturing, and will bring into discussion the state-of-the-art and progress for sustainable manufacturing through service orientation by help of:

• Dynamic and Green Infrastructure: the creation of intelligent control infrastructures that reduce costs, are dynamic and secure, and optimize the resource usage for energy and space efficiency.
• New Intelligence and Smart Work: efficient data fusion using context-sensitive information processing tools; adapting legacy plant equipment into reconfigurable resource teams in order to increase productivity and agility to business processes changes.

In the above mentioned context, the "product-driven manufacturing", "intelligent product", "distributed intelligence" and "collaborative technologies: swarm intelligence, semi-heterarchical control" approaches are expected to be found in the session's papers; the common concept in this respect considers active holon entities or agents, created by intelligent embedded devices as information counterparts of the products they accompany during their manufacturing lifecycle.

Papers are requested on topics related but not limited to:

• Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Control
• Web Services and Wireless Automation for Manufacturing
• Product Driven Automation for Manufacturing
• Supply Chain and Logistics
• Resource Allocation, Production Planning and Scheduling
• Monitoring, Diagnosis and Maintenance of Manufacturing Systems
• Service Oriented Architectures in Manufacturing
• Distributed and Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing
• Discrete Event Systems in Manufacturing
• Bio-Inspired Theories for Holonic Manufacturing and Evolutionary Robotics
• Dynamic and Green Infrastructure for Sustainable Manufacturing
• Operational Research Applications in CAD/CAM/CAE
• Service Orientation of Robots
• Swarm Intelligence in Robotics and Manufacturing
• Natural-like Human-Robot Interaction