Rationales for Holonic Manufacturing Control

Abstract

This paper is concerned with providing a clear business basis for the emerging research field of holonic manufacturing systems. The holonic approach is to develop highly flexible manufacturing operations from a set of readily reconfigurable building blocks, which are designed to integrate easily and collaborate dynamically with one another as production demand changes. The business basis is assessed through a requirements deployment process which establishes a link between business trends and requirements on the manufacturing operations and control systems in particular. These control systems requirements are compared to the anticipated control system properties of holonic manufacturing systems. 1 Introduction The field of Holonic Manufacturing was initiated in the early 1990's [1, 2] to address the upcoming challenges of the 21 st century. It is intended to provide a building-block or "plug and play" capability for developing and operating a manufacturing system. Since 1990, an in...