Myopic Behavior in Heterarchical Control of FMS

Heterarchical Control Architectures (HeCA) have shown various benefits such as agility and reactivity, but have to face some drawbacks in order to be implemented in the industrial world. Precisely, one of the problems encounter in heterarchical systems is referred as the lack of a global view and reference of the whole system, to actually guarantee optimal decisionmaking. This behavior had been labeled by some researchers as "Myopia". This paper is intended to look for this kind of behavior in other domains, and then try to identify and set-up a classification scheme, appropriate to a production systems' scenario. Then, different methodologies attempting to solve this issue are shown and also classified according to the type of myopia they try to diminish, and their robustness. In order to demonstrate specifically this matter, a case study is reported to exhibit the phenomenon and then a basic solution is implemented over the AIP-PRIMECA manufacturing cell located at the University of Valenciennes, France. Finally, some conclusions and challenges will serve as a mark for an interesting research path, aiming at the adoption and industrial deployment of HeCA.