Development of holonic manufacturing execution systems

Rapid changes of market demands and pressures of competition require manufacturers to maintain highly flexible manufacturing systems to cope with a complex manufacturing environment. To meet these requirements, this work adopts the concepts of holon and holarchy to design manufacturing systems. Holon and holarchy are derived from the studies of social organizations and living organisms and possess the properties of intelligence, autonomy, cooperation, reconfigurability, and extensibility. Moreover, advanced manufacturing systems also require the properties of security certification and failure recovery. Based on the requirements of these properties, a systematic approach is proposed to develop a holonic manufacturing execution system (HMES) for the semiconductor industry. This systematic approach starts with a system analysis by collecting domain requirements and analyzing domain knowledge. The HMES Holarchy is designed by the procedure of constructing an abstract object model based on domain knowledge, partitioning application domain into functional holons, identifying generic parts among functional holons, developing the Generic Holon, defining holarchy messages and the holarchy framework of HMES, and finally designing functional holons based on the Generic Holon. It is believed that this proposed systematic approach provides a novel and efficient way to design HMES.