Erlang-based holonic controller for a palletized conveyor material handling system

Abstract Holonic systems have been a popular approach to face the challenges of the modern manufacturing environment and should continue to play a vital role in the fourth industrial revolution. Holonic control implementations have often made use of multi-agent systems – this paper presents, as a potential alternative, a case study implementation based on Erlang. Erlang is a functional programming language with strong scalability, concurrency and fault-tolerance characteristics, which prove to be beneficial when applied to the manufacturing control context. The case study used in this paper is the holonic control of a palletized conveyor material handling system – this implementation was chosen to demonstrate the advantages that Erlang can offer as implementation language for holonic systems.