Robustness in adaptative Holonic Multiagent Systems : the Open-Control concept

MAS are particularly pertinent to deal with distributed and dynamic environment. The management of business workflow, of flexible manufacturing systems are typically some examples of problems where the use of MAS is a actual benefit. Indeed, this kind of application requires a robust and flexible control of data 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 of being influenced autonomously via an Optimization Mechanism (OM). We illustrate our proposition by an implementation on a flexible assembly cell in our university.