Holonic Manufacturing Execution System Research Articles

Collaborative Systems, Operation and Task of the Manufacturing Execution Systems in the 21st Century Industry

Until the first two decades of the 21st century, as part of the Enterprise Resourse Planning (ERP), the Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and related systems have undergone development in both complexity and efficiency. In the field of production technology, there are many sources of work nowadays to get a detailed picture of the solutions offered by MES. The purpose of this article is to give a comprehensive overview of the MES solutions that currently used in industry. In addition to the general structure of the systems and Holonic MES are briefly described. Special attencion is paid to various collaborative systems that complement the MES. The additional manufacturing tools for MES is also described shematically in this article.

Computational Complexity and Scalability Analysis of PROSA and delegate MAS

This paper discusses the results of the computational complexity analysis with respect to time, which was performed on the Holonic Manufacturing Execution System (HMES) following the Product-Resource-Order-Staff Architecture (PROSA) and delegate Multi-Agent System (D-MAS). A practical approach was used instead of a theoretical or formal analysis. The analysis shows a polynomial relationship between the time complexity and number of resources and orders in the system and highlights where optimisations could improve the current implementation. Scalability experiments in the domain of multi-robot navigation, with respect to number of robots and environment size, shows this complexity is an upper bound.

Networked manufacturing control: An industrial case

Abstract The European Project MABE has investigated the application of a holonic manufacturing execution system (HMES) to networked production. This HMES implements the PROSA reference architecture [1]. Intelligent products manage their production in cooperation with intelligent resources. These intelligent products generate swarms of lightweight smart objects that respectively explore for suitable routings and reserve capacity at the intelligent resources [2]. The system is a self-organizing design. The research results revealed that the HMES design scales, without much effort, from a single plant control toward the control of a manufacturing network. Moreover, the HMES design was able to handle the part flows for the heat and surface treatment. Additionally, MABE has triggered research on trust to enable the HMES to cope with networks comprising independent organizations. Its results target cooperation in semi-closed networks. The research allows using track records during subsequent interactions, for instance to decide about slack values in schedules.

Intelligent Products in the Supply Chain Are Merging Logistic and Manufacturing Operations

AbstractThe control of a supply chain becomes more and more complex. The actions and operations of the different parties need to be coordinated in order to control the supply chain in an efficient way. The concept of ‘Intelligent Product’ can play an important role in this challenge. The intelligent product searches actively for the needed services offered by (intelligent) resources. The Holonic Manufacturing Execution System developed at K.U.Leuven makes use of this concept to control the internal logistics of a manufacturing system. Because of the active role of the intelligent products, the HMES is scalable and can coordinate beyond organizational boundaries. The paper explains the intelligent product concept and indicates the advantages of this approach by describing how a cross-dock can be controlled and integration with the inbound and outbound vehicles can be achieved.

Design of Holonic Manufacturing Execution System with Control Mechanism Based Stigmergy

To deal with problem of manufacturing system stability caused by uncertain factors in discrete production process, holon was introduced to manufacturing execution system (MES). A distributed manufacturing control architecture based on holon was established. This architecture using cooperation mechanism based stigmergy to realize agility, autonomy and intelligence of system control. Based on the architecture, holon driven agents to visit production elements, acquiring dynamic information of production process. Model design of production factors as order, resource, raw material, product and management factors as optimize, execution was described amply. Finally, workflow of this system was depicted with an example of uncertain order factor.

Cooperation between a Holonic Schedule Execution System and the i2 Factory Planner

The paper presents an experimental study of holonic schedule execution. The output from industry-strength scheduling software is used as an initial schedule to be executed by an HMES (Holonic Manufacturing Execution System) (Valckenaers, 2005). This Holonic Manufacturing Execution System compensates for possible simplifications in the schedule. The experiments show an improved performance when using this initial schedule as a guideline. In addition, the experiments also reveal the need to extend the HMES capabilities so it interprets the schedule more intelligently and, simultaneously, assist the user while analyzing the results of the experiments.

A Petri net model of distributed control in a holonic Manufacturing Execution System

In a holonic manufacturing execution system, operations assignment and scheduling can be decided in real time by automatic negotiation between order holons and resource holons. Negotiation is used to conciliate the goals pursued by the software agents who constitute the control part of the holons. This paper proposes mathematical criteria to represent the agents’ goals, a game theoretic approach to analyze the possible outcomes of the negotiation process, and a Petri net model to represent the interaction protocols between order and resource agents. This model is analyzed in view of verifying the required properties of the protocol. In particular, certain conditions are proposed under which the following requirements are verified: no-blocking, selection of exactly one resource for each order, protocol termination in a bounded time.

Towards robust and efficient planning execution

This paper presents a holonic manufacturing execution system (MES) that cooperates with a planning system. This cooperation allows to combine the robustness and flexibility of the holonic MES with the optimisation performed by the planning system. The paper investigates the effect on the global performance of this cooperation for a specific manufacturing case in a series of experiments. It compares the effect of this cooperation when the planning is optimal with regard to the manufacturing case with situations where the planning system is not optimal. More precisely, it compares the performance of the HEMS in situations where the planning systems systematically misestimates the execution time of a workstation (e.g. a poorly maintained workstation or a partially operational workstation) to situations where this is not the case. The experiments are conducted under varying work loads. Also, the effort the Holonic MES puts in finding new solutions resembling the planning is varied. Finally, the paper reports the results of the experiments and draws conclusions.

Manufacturing execution systems for customized production

Mass customised manufacturing is a current tendency in many production sectors. In this scenario, the client details the desired product often using informatics means and respecting available options. This customisation context imposes systemic integration and co-operations between the concerned manufacturing entities to explore their capabilities, aiming at adaptability to the product heterogeneity. An integration element of the management system and systems related to the shop floor is the manufacturing execution system (MES). A conceivable way to allow MES supporting this customised e-manufacturing is the concept of smart-product, where each product “drives ” its own production, allowing a decoupling between production and order dispatching, as well as the consistency between physical and informational flows. A smart-product requests services from manufacturing resources and it can compete for them. These resources must co-operate based on their features and based on some established flexible co-operation logic, aiming to carry out smart-products requests. However, this is by itself another issue, firstly due to the heterogeneity of factory resources. Looking for homogenisation and integration of this diversity, resources and also smart-products may be “encapsulated” inside of communicating entities called “holons ”. However, the composition of holonic MES (H-MES) is not trivial, because of the dynamic between all holons may be complex. Previous studies presented the organisation of resource-HLs co-operation carried out by computational entities called “rules”. In this paper, it is proposed a conceptual solution of a meta-model for rules-oriented and product-driven H-MES and its application for the holonification of a design and simulation tool.

TOWARDS COOPERATING PLANNING AND MANUFACTURING EXECUTION SYSTEMS

This paper presents a holonic manufacturing execution system that cooperates with a planning system. This cooperation allows to combine the robustness and flexibility of the holonic MES with the optimisation performed by the planning system. The Holonic MES is implemented as a situated multi-agent system. The paper discusses the cooperation by means of a case study and experimental results.

Holonic Manufacturing Execution Systems

This paper presents the design of a holonic manufacturing execution system. The design is an instantiation of the PROSA reference architecture [1] augmented with coordination and control mechanisms inspired by natural systems – i.e. food foraging behavior in ant colonies. Research prototypes are implemented as multi-agent systems. The main coordination and control mechanisms ensure that the process plans are properly executed and emergently forecast the workload of the manufacturing resources as well as well as lead times and routings of the products. The design empowers the product instances to drive their own production; the coordination is completely decentralized. In contrast to many decentralized designs, the manufacturing execution system predicts future behavior and proactively takes measures to prevent impending problems from happening. A social control mechanism ensures that product instances adhere sufficiently to their declared intentions, which is necessary to guarantee adequate forecast accuracy. The design has been applied to an industrial test case, and the paper discusses results of this case study.

Development of holonic manufacturing execution systems

Rapid changes of market demands and pressures of competition require manufacturers to maintain highly flexible manufacturing systems to cope with a complex manufacturing environment. To meet these requirements, this work adopts the concepts of holon and holarchy to design manufacturing systems. Holon and holarchy are derived from the studies of social organizations and living organisms and possess the properties of intelligence, autonomy, cooperation, reconfigurability, and extensibility. Moreover, advanced manufacturing systems also require the properties of security certification and failure recovery. Based on the requirements of these properties, a systematic approach is proposed to develop a holonic manufacturing execution system (HMES) for the semiconductor industry. This systematic approach starts with a system analysis by collecting domain requirements and analyzing domain knowledge. The HMES Holarchy is designed by the procedure of constructing an abstract object model based on domain knowledge, partitioning application domain into functional holons, identifying generic parts among functional holons, developing the Generic Holon, defining holarchy messages and the holarchy framework of HMES, and finally designing functional holons based on the Generic Holon. It is believed that this proposed systematic approach provides a novel and efficient way to design HMES.

Manufacturing Enterprise Control and Management System Engineering: paradigms and open issues

Over several decades, control theory has developed its own set of more or less formal modelling techniques designed to automatically control the dynamic behaviour of complicated manufacturing systems and processes. The emerging Internet society is addressing new enterprise control and management integration (ECMI) challenges for agile business to manufacturing (B2M) purposes which enlarge the traditional setting of Automation Engineering to the systems engineering (SE) approach. In order to cope with the increasing complexity of integrating intelligence/information-intensive manufacturing automation within the networked manufacturing enterprise, Automation Engineering should be integrated into the systems engineering approach to achieve a holistic approach that treats in fine the technical operational manufacturing system emerging from the deployment of an ad hoc combination of formal and informal partial models. This paper emphasises that a Holonic Manufacturing Execution System Engineering ( HMESE) approach should be a relevant B2M SE approach along with other relevant scientific, industrial and educational areas dealing with information and intelligence control and management issues in agile automation.