A Holonic Approach to Warehouse Control

Warehouses play a critical role in the distribution of products of many suppliers to many customers. Traditionally, warehouse operations are controlled by centralised control systems. Because of increasing customer demands, the complexity of such systems becomes too large to respond optimally to all warehouse events. Holonic control systems try to overcome this limitation. This paper presents a framework that supports the development of holonic warehouse control systems. The framework, which is built on top of JADE middleware, allows a holonic control system to be generated from a warehouse layout model and a library of reusable behaviour components. The architecture of the framework and an example of its application to an existing warehouse are presented.

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