Reconfiguration Mechanism for Holonic Manufacturing Systems

Although holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) have been recognized as a paradigm to cope with changes in manufacturing environment based on a flexible architecture, several characteristics of HMS such as re-configurability have not been characterized quantitatively. To realize these advantages, more concrete mechanisms or methodologies need to be developed. The objectives of this paper are to probe into the characteristics of reconfigurability for HMS and propose design methodologies to realize these characteristics. We formulate and study a holarchy reconfiguration problem to deal with dynamic removal/addition of holons in HMS due to failure/recovery of resources. Finding a solution from the scratch to deal with resource failures is not an appropriate approach as it may lead to chaos at the shop floor. To achieve effective reconfiguration in HMS, a viable solution must be based on the nominal configuration and cooperation of holons. We define an impact function to characterize the impact of changes due to different holons in a holarchy. A reconfiguration mechanism based on the impact function is proposed to effectively reconfigure the systems to achieve minimal cost solutions.