A Service-Orientated Arhitecture for Holonic Manufacturing Control

The paper describes a solution and implementing framework for the management of changes which may occur in a holonic manufacturing system. This solution is part of the semi-heterarchical control architecture developed for agile job shop assembly with intelligent robots-vision workstations. Two categories of changes in the manufacturing system are considered: (i) changes occurring in resource status at process level: breakdown, failure of (vision-based) in-line inspection operation, and depletion of local robot storages; (ii) changes in production orders at business (ERP) level: rush orders. All these situations trigger production plan update and rescheduling (they redefine the list of Order Holons) by pipelining CNP-type resource bidding at shop-floor horizon with global product scheduling at aggregate batch horizon. Failureand recovery management are developed as generic scenarios embedding the CNP mechanism into production selfrescheduling. Implementing solutions and experimental results are reported for a 6-station robot-vision assembly cell with twin-track closed-loop pallet transportation system, Cartesian pallet feeding station, dual assembly component feeder with robot-vision tending and product tracking RD/WR devices. Future developments will consider manufacturing integration at enterprise level.