Design of reconfiguration mechanism for holonic manufacturing systems based on formal models

One of the key design issues of holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) is to effectively respond to resource failures based on the flexible holonic architecture. The objective of this paper is to propose a viable design methodology to implement reconfiguration mechanism in HMS. A reconfiguration mechanism is developed to accommodate changes based on collaboration of holons without leading to chaos at the shop floor. To deal with resource failures in HMS, an impact function is defined to characterize the impact of resource failures on different holons in a holarchy. A collaborative reconfiguration mechanism based on an impact function is proposed to effectively reconfigure the systems to achieve minimal cost solutions. The design and implementation methodology combines contract net protocol for negotiation of holons, Petri net for the representation of individual product holons and resource holons and FIPA-compliant agent platform for publication/discovery of holons. A simulation system is developed to verify the proposed reconfiguration mechanism.