The development of holonic information coordination systems with security considerations and error-recovery capabilities

A holonic manufacturing system (HMS), which is designed to realize an agile manufacturing enterprise, must be able to integrate the entire range of manufacturing activities from market demands, design, modeling, production, through delivery. These entire activities are implemented by several distributed sites. In order to effectively integrate these distributed sites, we adopt distributed object, mobile object, and object web technologies as well as the holon and holarchy concepts derived from studying social organizations and living organisms to develop a holonic information coordination system (HICS). The generic holon is first developed to achieve the properties of holon, error recovery and security certification. Communication holons are then generated by inheriting generic holon. Finally, communication holons are used to establish HICS. Thus, communication holons have the basic holonic attributes, such as intelligence, autonomy, and cooperation. Further, communication holons can handle information sharing, coordination among enterprises and data exchange by different data format. It is believed that HICS can meet the future requirements of supply chain information integration for virtual enterprises.