A holonic approach for manufacturing execution system design: An industrial application

Holonic manufacturing execution systems (HMES) are structures organized as a loosely coupled network of communicating agents to answer in a flexible way to necessities of reactivity and profitability. In this paper, we propose a PROSA-based HMES and we illustrate our approach on a real industrial application. The working of this HMES relies on a predictive and reactive behavior to perform the control of production cells. Mechanisms are proposed to synchronize the execution of manufacturing orders, as to guarantee the availability of components and to set time-limit constraints on task scheduling. We also propose a typology of production cells, and specific heuristics to solve the tasks scheduling problem, taking into account each optimization model.