THE OPEN-CONTROL CONCEPT FOR HOLONIC MANUFACTURING

Nowadays, the advances in information technology and electronics made possible attaching devices with decisional and communicational capabilities to almost all of the entities present in a Flexible Manufacturing System. This allows the passage from the classic centralized control approach to a fully decentralized approach where each entity has its own objectives, making it very hard for the system as a whole to achieve a global objective like minimizing the production time (makespan). In this context the paper proposes a new control concept in which commands from a superior level are not sent in a rigid manner but rather as recommendations. Open-control, along with the holonic manufacturing concept tries to offer the tools needed to face the rising complexity of Flexible Manufacturing Systems. After introducing the open-control paradigm, we illustrate one possible implementation based upon the holonic approach applied to a job shop production system, containing multiple networked robot workstations.