The control of myopic behavior in semi-heterarchical production systems: A holonic framework

Heterarchical control architectures are essentially founded on cooperation and full local autonomy, resulting in high reactivity, no master/slave relationships and local information retention. Consequently, these architectures experience myopic decision-making, bringing entities towards local optimality rather than the system's overall performance. Although this issue has been identified as an important problem within heterarchical control architectures, it has not been formally studied. The aim of this paper is to identify the dimensions of myopic behavior and propose mechanisms to control this behavior. This study focuses on myopic behavior found in manufacturing control. For this particular study, we propose a holonic framework and a holonic organization that integrates specific mechanisms to control the temporal and social myopia. Our proposal was validated using simulations designed for solving the allocation problem in flexible manufacturing systems. These simulations were conducted to show the improvement by integrating the new mechanisms. These simulation results indicate that the myopic control mechanisms achieve better performance than the reactive strategies, because not only they introduce a planning horizon, but also because they balance local and global objectives, seeking a consensus. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.