A Holonic Component-Based Approach to Reconfigurable Manufacturing Control Architecture

Holonic Manufacturing Systems have emerged over the last seven years as strategy for manufacturing control system design. A new approach called Holonic ComponentBased Architecture (HCBA) to establish a manufacturing control system as to cope with rapid changes in manufacturing environment is presented in this paper. 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-andplay capability via an Internet-based infrastructure.