Rationales for Holonic Applications in Chemical Process Industries

This paper presents a set of rationalesa behind applying so called holonic manufacturing principles as a technological solution to the growing business concerns in chemical process industries. The anticipated benefits from holonic approach stem from the use of a distributed control systems architecture that supports flexible unit operations to dynamically integrate and collaborate with others as and when the production conditions change. A requirements deployment process is used to relate the business pressures in CPI to a set of systems requirements within key areas of Process engineering and Process control. By creating a vision of a holonic process plant, it is next illustrated how a holonic approach might eliminate limitations of the conventional top-down methodology of designing process control systems through a radical, bottom up approach to the structuring and operation of the process plants.