From system requirements to holonic manufacturing system analysis

Research on Holonic Manufacturing Systems is undergoing a huge amount of interest and developments. In spite of the great amount of effort devoted to architectures and algorithms for holonic control of manufacturing systems, there is little work about design methodologies. The present work presents a multi-agent approach for analysis of Holonic Manufacturing Systems, it is based on an abstract agent definition and the PROSA reference architecture for holonic systems. The analysis process to identify and specify holons is organized around five views of the system and integrates the advantages of proven multi-agent methodologies to the manufacturing field. An industrial case example from the ceramic domain is presented to show the characteristics of the approach.