ARTI-Based Holonic Manufacturing Execution System Using the BASE Architecture: A Case Study Implementation

With industry's drive to adopt Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing processes, intelligent automated manufacturing has become largely sought after. With defining features such as robustness, reconfigurability and scalability, the Holonic Manufacturing Execution System (HMES) approach shows great potential to satisfy Industry 4.0 requirements. Implementations of these systems has been aided by the development of holonic reference architectures, such as the Product-Resource-Order-Staff-Architecture (PROSA) and its recent revision the Activity-Resource-Type-Instance (ARTI) architecture. This paper presents an ARTI-based HMES, implemented using the Biography-Attributes-Schedule-Execution (BASE) architecture. The BASE architecture guides the development of digital administration shells for resources, and it is deemed suitable for implementing the different holon types of the ARTI architecture. The case study system is a Fischertechnik Industry 4.0 Training Factory-a small-scale manufacturing system. The complexity of the case study, which comprises several interacting subsystems, provides a good basis to evaluate the ARTI and BASE architectures for HMES development. The paper reports that the ARTI architecture provides a well-defined structure for the conceptual design of HMESs, while the BASE architecture effectively supports the implementation of ARTI-based HMESs.