An agent-based approach to holonic manufacturing systems

This paper presents a new approach to the design of the architecture of a computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) system. It starts with arguing why decentralised approaches to model CIM systems are superior to centralised ones and presents the basic ideas of novel approaches which are best characterised as fractal or holonic systems. The paper argues that software agents are the ideal means to implement such systems and presents the agent architecture InteRRaP for agent design InteRRaP is then used to describe a hierarchical 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 autonomous system layer, and the machine control layer. Two application scenarios are described at the end of the paper. While one of these scenarios is more research-oriented, the second one is directly related to an industrial real-world setting.