Holonic system architecture for scalable infrastructures

In a previous paper Gruver, Kotak, van Leeuwen and Norrie proposed a Holonic Systems Architecture for manufacturing co-ordination. In another project Daimler-Chrysler demonstrated that a holonic approach resulted in significant improvements in productivity and robustness of their engine assembly line design and the technique was found to be scalable and could be implemented in a stepwise fashion. Presently NRC is examining the ways of evolving a hydrogen infrastructure for fuelling hydrogen in fuel cell vehicles. Such an infrastructure will need to be scalable, reliable and cost competitive. Therefore we chose to use the holonic approach for modelling and simulation of such an infrastructure, which presently does not exist and will initially be sparse and highly distributed. This paper describes the original design features of the holonic system architecture, the hydrogen infrastructure requirements and the enhancements we made to the architecture in the process of implementing the test application. We used a 3-D simulation technology to create a virtual hydrogen infrastructure, created holons to proxy its elements (i.e., hydrogen generation, storage and dispensing stations, vehicles and highways with alternate routes) and the interface between the virtual and holonic worlds. We systematically introduce holons which proxy real physical devices, to demonstrate how this architecture could be phased in from a virtual model to the physical world without changing the holonic control.