Deadline control in holonic manufacturing using mobile agents

Manufacturing organizations have an ever-increasing need to produce and assemble high-quality, customized goods for quick delivery to market. Agent-based holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) are intended to support reconfiguration in this commercial environment by adapting to changes in product mixes, order sizes and malfunctions on the shop-floor. All of these changes must be performed in a distributed shop-floor environment while adhering to constraints imposed on the holons in terms of how they behave and interact in real-time. We examine the characteristics of holons based on mobile agents that migrate to the hardware controller responsible for executing the manufacturing task and monitor the status of execution for these tasks. Appropriate compensatory actions are then initiated to ensure that task deadlines are satisfied as much as possible. It is also argued that such a conceptual model will facilitate research and development of mobile agent-based holonic manufacturing systems with respect to HMS reconfiguration in real-time