On the Design and Implementation of Holonic Manufacturing Systems

Some points regarding the design and implementation of holonic manufacturing systems are presented. As the holonic approach supposes a distributed architecture regarding both planning and execution, certain methods and techniques of multi-agent systems can be used. These need specific adaptations, and the paper is focused on describing how the planning solution is conceived in order to obtain the proper coordination in the holonic system and the way communication can be solved using a CORBA based service oriented architecture. The proposed scheme is exemplified in the case of the resource holonspsila materialization. The developed architecture was tested on a manufacturing system with real industrial equipment. The respective system and the considered manufacturing scenarios constitute a valuable testbed for the validation of the holonic method.