A holonic component-based approach to reconfigurable manufacturing control architecture

Holonic manufacturing systems have emerged over the last seven years (1993-2000) as strategy for manufacturing control system design. A new approach called Holonic Component-Based Architecture (HCBA) to establish a manufacturing control system as to cope with rapid changes in manufacturing environment is presented. Intelligent building blocks in terms of resource and product are proposed to dynamically form a virtual controller via a computer network, and to perform co-operative control execution and diagnosis operations. This concept enables the design, operation and maintenance of the manufacturing controller to be performed in a distributed manner, which can increase the agility and responsiveness of an integrated system. This flexible structure has been implemented in a robot assembly cell to show its plug-and-play capability via an Internet based infrastructure.