Engineering Holonic Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) was first proposed as a new manufacturing paradigm at the beginning of 1990 and has subsequently received a lot of attention in academic and industrial research. The application of holonic concepts to manufacturing was initially motivated by the inadequacy of existing manufacturing systems in the following two aspects: (i) dealing with the evolution of products within an existing production facility, and (ii) maintaining a satisfactory performance outside of normal operating conditions. In spite of the large number of developments reported in Holonic Control Architectures and Holonic Control Algorithms, there is very little work reported on Methodologies for HMS. Manufacturing requirements impose significant properties on HMS making the modelling process of HMS a complex and difficult task. In this work we describe how to engineer Holonic Manufacturing Systems using a Multi-agent System method. Our approach is based on holonic systems specific requirements, and it incorporates software engineering principles in order to assist the system designers at each development stage. It implements a collaborative-engineering process for HMS, and provides clear and unambiguous analysis and design guidelines.

Introduction

The manufacturing sector is currently facing a fundamental change from a seller's market to a buyer's market [1]. Competition has intensified from a national scale to a global arena [2], product life cycles have shrunk, yet there is an escalating requirement to satisfy the specific and individual needs of customers. The manufacturer's success is not only measured by their ability to cost-effectively produce a single product, but also by flexibility, agility and versatility. The changes in markets, customer requirements, and technology have become the competition criteria. These rapid environmental changes have forced companies to improve their manufacturing performance in conditions of increasing uncertainty. In order to survive, manufacturing systems need to adapt themselves at an ever-increasing pace to incorporate new technologies, new products, new organizational structures, etc.

The above trends have motivated researchers in academia and industry to create and exploit new production paradigms on the basis of autonomy and cooperation because both concepts are necessary for creating flexible behaviour and thus to adapt to the changing production conditions. Such technologies provide a natural way to overcome such problems, and design and implement distributed intelligent manufacturing environments [1]. Distributed intelligent manufacturing systems, and Holonic Manufacturing Systems are considered important approaches for developing industrial distributed systems.

In this work we discuss the engineering of Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) with ANEMONA. ANEMONA is a software engineering method that has merged modelling concepts from distributed intelligent system development and the specific modelling requirements of Holonic Manufacturing Systems. Section 2 overviews the insights of Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, focusing on HMS and agent-based manufacturing. Section 3 discusses the complexity of modelling HMS. The relationships between the agent and holonic approaches are analyzed in Section 4. The features of ANEMONA are presented in Section 5. Section 6 summarizes a simplified real case study. Finally, Section 7 details the conclusions and future works.