Reference architecture for holonic manufacturing systems: PROSA

Abstract

Future manufacturing systems need to cope with frequent changes and disturbances. As such, their control requires constant adaptation and high flexibility. Holonic manufacturing is a highly distributed control paradigm that promises to handle these problems successfully. It is based on the concept of autonomous cooperating agents, called 'holons'. This paper gives an overview of the holonic reference architecture for manufacturing systems as developed at PMA-KULeuven. This architecture, called PROSA, consists of three types of basic holons: order holons, product holons, and resource holons. They are structured using the object-oriented concepts of aggregation and specialisation. Staff holons can be added to assist the basic holons with expert knowledge. The resulting architecture has a high degree of self-similarity, which reduces the complexity to integrate new components and enables easy reconfiguration of the system. PROSA shows to cover aspects of both hierarchical as well as heterarchical control approaches. As such, it can be regarded as a generalisation of the two former approaches. More importantly, PROSA introduces significant innovations: the system structure is decoupled from the control algorithm, logistical aspects can be decoupled from technical ones, and PROSA opens opportunities to achieve more advanced hybrid control algorithms.

Technological Theory of Cloud Manufacturing

“…Within this context, a significant body of research emerged, particularly with the IMS (Intelligent Manufacturing System) community with worldwide membership, which is an industry-led, global, collaborative research and de-velopment program established to develop the next generation of manufacturing and processing technologies. The IMS philosophy adopts heterarchical and collaborative control as its information system architecture [23,19,17]. The behavior of the entire manufacturing system therefore becomes collaborative, determined by many interacting subsystems that may have their own independent interests, values, and modes of operation.…”

Intelligent Decision Support and Agent-Based Techniques Applied to Wood Manufacturing

“…Csaji et al [4] presents a machine learning functionality with reinforcement learning neural networks to improve the scheduling in the PROSA holonic architecture [34].…”

Evolvable Systems: An Approach to Self-X Production

“…In RMS [Van brussel (1998)], the Assembly System design starts from the "New Product Requirements". The product to be assembled is analysed in order to find all the "Assembly System Requirements", which means that the driver of the whole process is the Product.…”

“…NOTE: Holonic Manufacturing Systems [Van Brussel et al (1998)] and Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems [Elmaraghy (2006)] do not represent evolvability, as will be described later.…”