Agent-based holonic design and operations environment for distributed manufacturing

Abstract

This paper describes a practical system framework for holonic design and operations in a distributed manufacturing environment using multi-agent systems (MASs) and simulation techniques. Three components are proposed and developed in this system: holonic control, virtual simulation, and human/system integration. With the common system goal as the objective, the holonic control, established upon the JADE™ platform in a distributed method, acts as the brain of the entire system. The virtual simulation simulates actions and operations of the physical devices under the holonic control. While the human/system integration facilitates human experts’ interaction with the system to choose or override the system’s holonic solution. A conceptual material transport system is developed to demonstrate and validate the proposed idea. These key attributes of holonic manufacturing system (HMS), such as robustness when faced with perturbation, autonomous, cooperation and coordination were tested and validated in this open and distributed environment. It shows that the proposed system can satisfy the agility, distribution, and robustness requirements.