Holonic Manufacturing Systems

Outline
Introduction Historical development Further research Basic concepts and defination HIM system Applications Advantages Conclusion

Introduction
The Holonic idea is a new paradigm develop to organize activities and meet the agile, scalable ,robust and fault-tolerant requirements, overcomes many difficulties faced by existing convectional, rigid systems in manufacturing, offices etc. It is not a method or a process but a guiding philosophy for effective and efficient way of getting a performance better than the traditional approaches in use today. This concept can be applied to our day to day life, activities as long as efficiency is needed to be measure.

Historical development of holonic maufacturing system

Herbert Simon (1969) concluded that complex systems will evolve from simple systems much more rapidly if there are stable intermediate forms than if there are not. Simons analysis reveals why every complex adaptive system is hierarchic. Koestler propose the word holon to describe the hybrid nature of subwholes/parts in real-life systems; holons simultaneously are selfcontained wholes to their subordinated parts, and dependent parts when seen from the inverse direction.

Koestler defines a holarchy as a hierarchy of self-regulating holons which function (a) as autonomous wholes in supraordination to their parts. (b) as dependent parts in sub-ordination to controls on higher levels (c) in co-ordination with its local environment (other holons and external environment).

The top-level holon, being the overall whole, can still contain smaller components inside.

Each holon can also belong to as many holarchies as necessary with their local environment.

Further Research
K.U.Leuven (the PMA division) efforts in a nationally funded research project GOA/HMS -- Concerted Research Action on Holonic Manufacturing Systems. Lasting 4 years, this project combines PMAs knowledge in flexible shop floor control (Valckenaers, 1993, 1995) Non-linear process planning (Detand, 1993) Reactive scheduling (Valckenaers, 1994c, 1995, Bongaerts, 1994) Machine controllers (Kruth, 1994b) to develop a holonic architecture for production systems and implement two prototypes or testbeds. In 1997, HMS became one of the first fully endorsed IMS projects. The HMS concept combines the best features of hierarchical and heterarchical organisation (Dilts, 1991). It preserves the stability of hierarchy while providing the dynamic flexibility of hierarchy.

What is Holon?
Holon: An autonomous and co-operative building block of a manufacturing system for transforming, transporting, storing and/or validating information and physical objects. It consists of an information processing part and often a physical processing part.

A holon can be part of another holon.

Holons are stable forms, which survive disturbances. These are intermediate forms, which provide the proper functionality for the bigger whole. Subject to control from (multiple) higher authorities.

Types of Holons
There are three types of basic building blocks in a holonic manufacturing system (HMS): Product holons.

Resource holons
Order holons.

PRODUCT HOLON
It holds the process and product knowledge to ensure the correct fabrication of the product with sufficient quality. It acts as an information server to the other holons in the HMS. Provides consistent and up-to-date information on the product life-cycle, user requirements, design, and process plan and bill of material. It holds the methods to allocate the production resources, knowledge and procedures to organise, use and control these production resources to drive production.

RESOURCE HOLON
A resource holon consists of a physical part, namely a production resource in the HMS, and of an information processing part that controls the resource. Abstraction for the production means such as machines ,tools, tool holders furnaces conveyors pipelines Pallets raw materials,, material storage, personnel energy floor space

Scheduling Local Optimization Model

ORDER HOLON
It is an active entity responsible for performing the work correctly and on time. Basically used for model of the task. Link product and ressource. An order holon represents a manufacturing order. Knows compound order and components orders.

It explicitly captures all information and information processing of a job.

HOLONIC MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

A holarchy that integrates the entire range of manufacturing activities from order booking through design, production, and marketing to realize the agile manufacturing enterprise. HMS is one approach which is closely related to the Multi-agent systems. The main goal is to reach an intelligent manufacturing system that deals to continuous market changes that require expressive changes in the production system. Systems that can adapt to the new situation easier than a competing system, gaining benefit. Adapting faster than the competition gives a higher benefit in using new opportunities.

 The occurrence of changes and disturbances are considered as normal system occurrences, and the manufacturing control system shall be able to effectively handle these situations. The holonic manufacturing system is capable to attend to a larger scale of opportunities It can identify local capabilities a distributed configuration that attends to a specific requirement.

HOLONIC MANUFACTURING SYSTEM

Properties of HMS
Autonomy: The capability of an entity to create and control the execution of its own plans and/or strategies. Co-operation: A process whereby a set of entities develops mutually acceptable plans and executes these plans.

Holarchy: A system of holons that can co-operate to achieve a goal or objective. Itdefines the basic rules for co-operation of the holons and thereby limits their autonomy. Holarchies are open-ended at the top and at the bottom.
Holonic attributes: attributes of an entity that make it a holon. The minimum set is autonomy and co-operativeness.

APPLICATIONS
In automotive supply chain. In research networks where teams of scientists work together to develop new products; and in the web itself.

Medical diagnostic systems Entirely automatic self-controlling factories (paper, chemicals). Computer integrated manufacturing (CIM). Flight simulators

Advantages
Systemic model: Each part is a whole and part of a whole. Decision-making: Decentralized and concurrent Global view of the system Lower cost/effort for adaptation allows profiting from smaller, temporal opportunities.

Society of cooperative agents: a common goal. It can adapt and react to dynamic changes in the environment such as disturbances and market changes.

Disadvantages
Lack of conventional control.

Conclusion
Holonic Approach for manufacturing execution system. Real-time and dynamic scheduling. Global rescheduling. Consider local and global decision making. Integration of complex models. Application in a real industrial context.