Product-driven automation in a service oriented manufacturing cell

The paper describes a solution for the automation of a flexible manufacturing system using the concept of product-driven automation. A semi-heterarchical control model based on the concept of holonic manufacturing is proposed which switches its operation mode from hierarchical to heterarchical in the presence of perturbations to ensure as long as possible global optimization and agility to changes in the production environment. In order to ensure this functionality a service oriented manufacturing environment is proposed and implemented, whose structure is described by and accessed through a decentralized fault-tolerant Resource Service Access Model. This mode is used to reduce the myopia of the scheduling system at the level of products in execution. Besides the design of a generic structural and dynamic model, a real implementation solution is proposed using a multi-agent framework.