An Open-Control Concept for a Holonic Multiagent System

MAS are particularly adapted to deal with distributed and dynamic environment. The management of business workflow, or data flow, flexible manufacturing systems is typically a good application field for them. This kind of application requires centralization of the data control and flexibility to face with changes on the network. In the context of FMS, where products and resources entities can be seen as active, this paper presents the open-control concept and gives an example of its instantiation with holonic scheme. The open-control concept proposed in this paper exhibits the classic explicit control, as well as an innovative type of control called implicit control that allows system entities to be influenced via an Optimization Mechanism (OM). We illustrate our proposition by an implementation on a flexible assembly cell in our university.

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