Schedule Execution in Holonic Manufacturing Systems

To bridge the gap between advanced scheduling research and industrial practice, high performance scheduling needs to be combined with reactivity to disturbances. This paper presents an architecture for shop floor control (SFC) that builds upon the concepts of holonic manufacturing and combines the advantages of traditional hierarchical control with the benefits of distributed control. The architecture supports the use of several control strategies, like hierarchical control, heterarchical control and other holonic control strategies. These intermediate strategies are based on a tight co-operation between scheduler and SFC holon.