Holonic adaptive production control systems

Manufacturing systems are a stochastic, dynamic environment, with new jobs arriving continuously to the system, certain resources becoming unavailable and additional resources introduced. In order to support this particular environment in distributed manufacturing it is necessary to introduce new mechanisms to implement dynamic, distributed scheduling, specially to face disturbances. This paper presents an overview of the manufacturing scheduling problem and some techniques available to handle it. To solve the problem of stochastic, dynamic reaction to disturbances an adaptive control approach is described, based in the holonic manufacturing paradigm and the autonomy degree concept, which each operational holon uses to allow the balance between competition and cooperation.