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.