Requirements for holonic manufacturing systems control

Real time control of holonic manufacturing systems requires a radically different approach from that of traditional unit level regulatory control. Because they need to automatically adapt and reconfigure based on the ever changing requirements of the manufacturing system, control systems based on this approach are termed metamorphic control systems. The engineering of such software centric metamorphic control systems for dynamically reconfigurable distributed multi sensor based holonic systems is addressed. An integrated and uniform event driven control architecture is specified for various functional levels of metamorphic control system. This architecture utilizes the emerging International Electrotechnical Commission function block standard (IEC 1499) for industrial process measurement and control systems to specify the requisite behavior of distributed control software components (agents).