Intelligent control for holonic manufacturing systems

To enable holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) to have their desired characteristics of adaptability and reconfigurability, their control systems need to be dynamically reconfigurable. An holonic control system implementing metamorphic mechanisms which facilitate such reconfiguration has therefore been developed conceptually and is presented in this paper. An integrated and generic event-driven control architecture is described for the various functional levels of this distributed holonic control system. The architecture utilizes the emerging IEC 1499 function block standard to specify the requisite behaviour of the distributed-control software components. The core low-level control mechanisms have been implemented within an agent-based distributed real-time operating system and a prototype holonic control system using the new architecture has been developed and tested.