Product Specification for Flexible Workflow Orchestrations in Service Oriented Holonic Manufacturing Systems

摘要

Holonic Manufacturing Systems are a response solution for the emergent need of flexible, reactive and productive manufacturing systems. This paper relies on PROSA, a classical holonic reference architecture, which makes use of a product specification, a process specification and a means to determine a resource's production abilities and capacity, but does not define a specific method for representing such. This paper proposes an approach to define a product's process specification model that integrates the principles and advantages of Service-oriented Architectures, Petri-Nets and Product Families. Then, a re-definition of the basic holons is given to have a glimpse on a possible exploitation of this new approach, together with a short-term forecasting strategy, for the flexible orchestration of workflows. Finally, it is shown how the proposed product's process specification model enhances the HMS's flexibility, reactivity and productivity giving rise to a Service-oriented Holonic Manufacturing System.