Development of reusable, configurable, extensible holonic manufacturing system

Modern manufacturing system have to deal with dynamic situations such as customer specification changes, machine break-down, emergency orders and other kinds of disturbances. This requires the manufacturing system to be adaptive to handle such situations. The holonic concept has been proposed as an efficient paradigm for developing such an adaptive manufacturing system. There are still some critical issues to be investigated such as how to define the holons for a given application context and make them reusable, what should be an appropriate system architecture and how to design the system cooperation mechanisms for better system performance. The Intelligent Machine Architecture (IMA) is a software architecture developed at Vanderbilt University. It provides a framework for developing reusable components and constructing reconfigurable, extensible systems. Although it is mainly used for robots, it is also a suitable development tool for designing adaptive manufacturing systems. The authors explain how to build reusable, reconfigurable and extensible holonic manufacturing systems based on the IMA framework