A PRACTICAL REPRESENTATION OF HOLONIC MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

摘要

Holonic manufacturing systems is now a well established research area with a significant body of work being undertaken which has resulted in generation of a large number of holonic manufacturing system configurations, architectures and reference models, together with various holonic approaches to the shop floor control, production scheduling, and machine control. There is now a common belief amongst the research community that the application of such holonic concepts would result in meeting the responsiveness and agility of manufacturing activities, necessitated by the modern pressures of the global market. However, the most important challenge remains the persuasion of decision makers within manufacturing companies and in particular small to medium enterprises to adopt these research results in their daily operation. The work reported in this paper is directed at addressing this challenge through realisation of a practical representation of holonic concepts to support a typical machining facility in a form of a laboratory-based demonstrator. In this practical presentation a conscious effort has been made to utilise commercially available and commonly used manufacturing software packages.