COMMERCIAL IN CONFIDENCE JACK-based Holonic Control of a Gift Box Packing Cell Internal Report of the Centre for Distributed Automation and Control

Executive Summary The Gift Box Packing Cell has been constructed at Cambridge University's Institute for Manufacturing in order to demonstrate JACK-based holonic control and illustrate how a packing environment can be responsive to change. The cell, with its industrial strength hardware, enables a customer to select three Gillette™ personal grooming products (razor, shaving gel, form and deodorant) and also how they are to be packed into one of two box types. The development work on this cell is being done by the IfM's Centre for Distributed Automation and Control with contributions from the Auto-ID Centre and Agent Oriented Software Ltd (AOS). Holonic control is a methodology based on the application of autonomous cooperative building blocks that can be put together into a loose organization to manage a factory. These systems are particularly well suited to responsive manufacturing settings where orders, production processes and resources regularly change. In this report, we will show how the holons used to control activities within this cell were designed and how these holons were encoded using the JACK Intelligent Agents™ platform. This report described the features and implementation of this holonic packing cell to support a plethora of behaviours needed in responsive factories, including unloading of goods coming into the factory, storage of work-in-progress (WIP), sorting and retrieving of stored goods, mass-customised packing batches of gift boxes based on customer choice and priority, performing quality control of completed gift boxes, unpacking unneeded boxes, handling failure of redundant resources, and dealing with rush orders. The report highlights the conceptual framework for achieving such responsiveness by using holons. This framework can be seen as a measure of operational performance in the face of disruptions and is mainly influenced by the way holons act, interact and affect the physical manufacturing environment. The main principle for building these behaviours is founded on the independence of orders from resources, coupled with the 'plug and play' approach for incorporating new hardware and the potential for using sophisticated resource allocation and fault tolerance strategies. The JACK Intelligent Agents™ platform was successfully used to build the cell's holonic control system, and this implementation is also discussed here. Throughout this report we attempt to answer the following questions: − How can agent-based holons be best integrated with manufacturing hardware to provide responsiveness in terms of: (i) offering an increased range of manufacturing operations, (ii) being coupled together coherently at run time, and (iii) compensating …