A Novel Implementation Approach for Resource Holons in Reconfigurable Product Manufacturing Cell

Holonic Control Architecture is a successful solution model for reconfigurable manufacturing problems. Two well-known different technologies have been used separately to implement the holonic control model. The first technology is IEC 61499 standard, and the second is autonomous reactive agent. Both of the previous mentioned technologies have its own pros and cons. Therefore this research is merging the two technologies together in one solution body, to magnifying their pros and reduce their cons. Ultimately; it provides a novel implementation model for the manufacturing holons, to be followed in similar reconfigurable manufacturing problems. A human worker in cooperation with a safe industrial robot, has been selected as a case study of a reconfigurable manufacturing problem. The proposed holonic control solution has been applied to the case study, to evaluate the ability of the solution to satisfy the requirements of the case study. The results show the ability of the proposed control solution to provide a flexible physical and logical interaction framework, which can be scaled over more workers in cooperation with more industrial robots.