While current research into decentralized control architectures for advanced manufacturing systems has proven the concept of architectures ranging from hierarchical to heterarchical control, neither extreme of the control architecture spectrum has proven to be the most appropriate choice for given manufacturing systems. This paper reports on research into a control architecture that does show promise in this area: a hybrid control architecture consisting of elements of both hierarchical and heterarchical control architectures. First control architectural issues are considered. Next, the concepts of virtual control organizations and partial dynamic hierarchies are presented. The paper then concludes with a discussion of recent work on implementing partial dynamic hierarchies within real-time control constraints, using an agent-based architecture.
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