Identifying and specifying holons in manufacturing systems

Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS) was first proposed as a new manufacturing paradigm in the beginning of 1990 and has since then received a lot of attention in academic and industrial research. In spite of the large number of developments reported in Holonic Control Architectures and Holonic Control Algorithms, there is very little work on methodologies for HMS development. There is a definite need to have methodological guidelines for holonic systems in order to assist the system designer in the HMS development. In this paper we discuss some guidelines for identifying and specifying holons from a manufacturing system requirement specification.