Agent-Based Manufacturing Advances in the Holonic Approach

Low-volume high-variety products like personalized cars or customized engines will be the key issues for manufacturing in the 21st century. The necessary control technology is based on the concept of holons, which are the units of production and behave as autonomous and cooperative agents, providing flexibility, adaptability, agility, and dynamic reconfigurability. This book presents the latest research results in agent-based manufacturing as carried out by researchers in academia and industry within the international "Holonic Manufacturing Systems" project. As this project was driven by industry, the results presented here are of vital interest not just to researchers in agent technologies or distributed artificial intelligence, but also to engineers and professionals in industry who have to respond to rapid changes and new demands in production.

I: Starters.- 1 Introduction.- 2 From Fractals and Bionics to Holonics.- 3 From FMS to HMS.- II: Systems Architecture.- 4 HMS/FB Architecture and Its Implementation.- 5 FIPA Standards and Holonic Manufacturing.- 6 Towards a Formalised HMS Model.- III: Systems Operation.- 7 An Investigation into a Computational Model for HMS.- 8 An HMS Operational Model.- 9 Holonic Diagnostics for an Automotive Assembly Line.- IV: Application Environments and Issues.- 10 HMS Development and Implementation Environments.- 11 Transport Agents — Specification and Development.- 12 A Holonic Shot-Blasting System.- 13 Holonic Manufacturing Control: Rationales, Developments and Open Issues.