Agent-based design of holonic manufacturing systems

This article presents a new approach to the design of the architecture of a computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) system. It starts with presenting the basic ideas of novel approaches which are best characterised as fractal or holonic models for the design of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). The article discusses hierarchical and decentralised concepts for the design of such systems and argues that software agents are the ideal means for their implementation. The agent architecture InteRRaP for agent design is presented and is used to describe a planning and control architecture for a CIM system, which is separated into the layer of the production planning and control system, the shop floor control systems, the flexible cell control layer, the autonomous system layer, and the machine control layer. Two application scenarios are described at the end of the article and results are reported which were obtained from experiments with the implementations for these application scenarios. While one of these scenarios - a model of an FMS - is more research-oriented, the second one - optimisation of a production line is directly related to an industrial real-world setting. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.