Holonic Manufacturing Execution Systems for Customised and Agile Production – Application Issues

The e-mass-customisation is one of tendencies in production, where which client details products using e-means. This imposes integration and advanced manufacturing-entity collaborations, aiming at adaptability to achieve product heterogeneity and response agility. An integration element of management and shop-floor systems is the Manufacturing Execution System (MES), which may integrate smart-product technology for dealing with customised agile e-manufacturing. In this technology, each product “drives” its manufacture allowing decoupling production and order-dispatching. A smart-product requests and even competes for services of resources, which in turn collaborate based on their features and some flexible logic. However, this collaboration is by itself complex, firstly due to resource heterogeneity. Thus, resources and even smart-products have been “encapsulated” in collaborative entities called Holons (HLs), for homogenisation and integration, thereby contributing for achieving Holonic MES (HMES). HMES comprises also other issues like control of the Holon dynamics. Previous studies proposed a solution, based on “Rules”, for control of Holon collaborations presented in the form of a HMES meta-model and applied over the tool ANALYTICE II. This paper proposes a case study about a flexible manufacturing cell, holonified and simulated in ANALYTICE II, which takes into account aspects about agility in customised production and allows proposing solution improvements.