Collaborative composition of processes in holonic manufacturing systems

Although it provides a flexible architecture to deal with changes and uncertainties, holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) also pose challenges in design and implementation. A challenge is to design a problem solving environment to guide the holons in HMS such that the decisions made by the individual holons as a whole collaboratively compose the production processes for the tasks. The objective of this paper is to propose a problem solving environment for the composition of minimal cost processes in HMS. Given a specific product type and due date, the problem is to dynamically compose a complete process in HMS to process the product by the due date. To achieve the objective, we combine multi-agent systems technology with Petri nets in this paper. We first propose architecture and a two-layer contract net protocol to describe the negotiation between order holons, product holons and resource holons in HMS. To determine whether it is feasible for a set product holons and resource holons to compose a process for an order holon, we propose Petri net models to capture the workflows and activities in product holons and resource holons, respectively. To optimize the cost in the composed manufacturing process, the concept of activity-based costing is adopted to assign the cost of the activities to Petri nets. The advantages of our design methodology include specification of workflows and resource activities with PNML to minimize the cost. To realize the two-layer contract net protocol relies on a mechanism for a holon to discover the services provided by other holons. We proposed a scheme for publication and discovery of holon services based on FIPA compliant multi-agent system platform. Based on the service publication and discovery scheme, interactions between holons with the two-layer contract net protocol can be realized. We develop a HMS system to solve the process composition problem.

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