The Story of the Holonic Packing Cell

Holonic Packing Cell is a manufacturing environment that is responsive to change and has been constructed at the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) at Cambridge University. 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 (AOS). The cell is geared towards experimenting with, and demonstrating the benefits of, holonic control. 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 production settings where orders, production processes and resources regularly change. In our story, we will show how this cell was conceptualized and how holons were encoded using the JACK Intelligent Agents™ platform.