Holonic Production System to Obtain Flexibility for Customer Satisfaction

The Holonic Production System (HPS) can be a valid choice to overcome the problems of traditional production sys-tems’ architectures, thanks to its capability to adapt and react to changes in the business environment whilst being able to maintain systemic synergies and coordination. The HPS is made of holons seen as functional production units which are simultaneously autonomous and cooperative. Although the holonic approach could represent a valid solution in order to pursue the necessary levels of agility of production systems, they have been scarcely implemented in practice and even less studied from a business studies perspective. The purpose of this discussion paper is to show the benefits of further research on cases of implementation of HPS from a business organization studies perspective. Very little re-search on this topic has been done outside the field of business engineering and computer science; the study of this topic from a different perspective can shed the light on new aspects and new applications of the theory.