One of the key design issues for distributed systems is to find proper
planning and coordination mechanisms when knowledge and decision capabilities
are spread along the system. This contribution refers holonic manufacturing
execution systems and highlights the way a proper modeling method - Petri
nets - makes evident certain problems that can appear when agents have to
simultaneously treat more goals. According to holonic organization the
planning phase is mainly dependent on finding an appropriate resource
allocation mechanism. The type of weakness is established by means of the
proposed Petri net models and further proved by simulation experiments. A
solution to make the holonic scheme avoid a failure in resource allocation is
mentioned, too.