A holonic shop floor control framework for flexible manufacturing systems

As the existing control architectures for FMS have many problems with respect to flexibility, reconfiguration and software development, which become worse as the system size increases, the international IMS programme proposed a new manufacturing philosophy called the Holonic Manufacturing System (HMS). Under the notion of HMS, manufacturing systems are built from a modular mix of standardised, autonomous and co-operative agents called holons. Inspired by such emerging concept, we carried out this research with the aim of devising a holonic control framework, which is suitable for future FMS shop floor scheduling and control. This paper addresses the design of the proposed framework as well as the underlying holonic philosophy. In order to verify the applicability of the framework, an experimental simulation system has been developed on a real-time and distributed computer platform. The system consists of a set of holon prototypes capable of performing real-time scheduling for both manufacturing and transportation tasks, and a collection of interacting software modules that assist the simulation running on these prototypes. Experimental results acquired from the simulation have demonstrated that the framework is extensible and re-configurable. Implementation of the simulation system also provides direction and a workable foundation for further research and development on HMS.