In general, the control systems for conventional manufacturing systems are organized into hierarchical layers such as, enterprise control, factory control, and shop floor control. In an approach based on division in scope and breadth of the problems these levels are designed to act with relative autonomy. However, currently manufacturing systems must necessarily be reconfigurable to assure feat...

Manufacturing companies suffering constant pressure from the market, in a scene of mass customization in large scale, are obliged to become agile and flexible. In last decade appeared several proposals of distributed architectures of production to addresses the market requirements. These proposals are mainly based on the following paradigms: Bionic Manufacturing System, Holonic Manufacturing Sy...

PROSA is a holonic reference architecture for manufacturing control. This paper is inspired by the practical experience of our group in applying this reference architecture in concrete applications. The paper makes two key observations. As a first observation, all entities in the ’world of interest’ should not only be represented as an agent in the multi-agent system but also as an entity in th...

Holonic manufacturing systems promise to support a more plug-and-play approach to configuring and operating manufacturing processes, and thereby could underpin an increasing need for market responsiveness and mass customised products. This paper is concerned with the manufacturing control issues associated with holonic manufacturing systems. It addresses three key issues: Firstly, by examining ...

Material Flow Control (MFC) mechanisms control the movement of jobs through a set stationery capacity resources on shop floor. Although objective MFC is item-centric, i.e. to flow individual jobs, most existing are resource-centric, focus managing resources. While this was justified by technical constraints real-time information feedback, advances in technology allow for new designs. In particu...

This paper presents an approach for supporting the connguration of Virtual Enterprises (VE) by holonic multiagent systems (H-MAS). At rst, we show that a VE can be naturally modeled as a H-MAS. Then, we take a closer look at two frameworks dealing with the systematic connguration of VEs. We will show that both frameworks are quasi identical and that in both decomposition , allocation and synthe...

Many manufacturing paradigms promise to meet the challenges of the next century much better than present approaches do. Two of these paradigms, holonic and agent-oriented manufacturing, have received a lot of attention in academia and industry lately. Their visions, however, have many concepts in common, such as autonomy, cooperation, and self-organization. In order to assess the difference bet...

Holonic enterprises are considered as one of the new types of networking organizations used to increase business efficiency. But in practice it requires to introduce a new type of management stimulating the interpreneur approach, active interaction between actors within the project teams, coordinated and effective decisions on resource scheduling in case of unpredictable events (new projects, b...

Agent-based systems technologies are of emerging interest in the specification and implementation of complex systems. This article introduces the CASA agent development system which seamlessly combines the BDI (Belief Desire Intention) approach with the FIPA agent communication language standard and an integrated specification of fuzzy controllers. The behavior of agents is defined by strategie...