PMA Holonic Manufacturing Systems Group (GOA/HMS)
Status: public -- Last revision: November, 1998 -- Expiration date: 31 December 2004
Research Overview
- History. Since 1985, PMA/K.U.Leuven started with the construction of a flexible assembly system,
consisting of four robots. Gradually, the research shifted in the direction of FMS scheduling and
control, and shop floor control for manufacturing systems in general. There now is an important
emphasis on agent-based manufacturing, and more specifically holonic manufacturing. The PMA research
group on holonic manufacturing also contains an important thread on on-line process planning and
NC control, originating from the FLEXPLAN/COMPLAN projects.
- Concepts and Ideas.
Holonic manufacturing (Valckenaers, 1994, 1995, Sugimura, 1997, Moriwaki, 1992) is a highly
distributed approach
for the development and operation of manufacturing systems, but distinguishes itself from the other distributed
approaches by explicitly introducing hierarchy in the system (Bongaerts, 1998b). Compared to the traditional
hierarchical systems, this hierarchy should be flexible, dynamic and reconfigurable.
- Reference Architecture.
Wyns developed PROSA, the PMA/K.U.Leuven holonic reference architecture for manufacturing
systems (Van Brussel, 1998,
Wyns, 1999). It mainly is an inter-holon architecture, identifying the kind of holons, their responsibilities, and the
structure in which they interact. The basic architecture consists out of three types of basic holons: order holons,
product holons, and resource holons. They are structured using object-oriented concepts like aggregation and
specialisation.
Staff holons can be added to assist the basic holons with expert knowledge (Bongaerts, 1996).
- Manufacturing Control.
In holonic manufacturing control, totally distributed algorithms (for instance based on a market mechanism) are
supplemented with a reactive scheduler. Research on manufacturing control at PMA are on
the integration
of scheduling and control in holonic manufacturing systems, on market algorithms (Wyns, 1999), on ants
behaviour (Peeters, Mascada project) and on a design pattern for distributed deadlock handling.
- Products and Processes.
The process planning and execution holarchy -- called process control -- takes care
of the functions ranging from product design, and process planning to on-line pro-duction, processes and monitoring.
PMA/K.U.Leuven developed a distributed, feature based process planning system, using a blackboard architecture
(Van Zeir, 1998), a feature based NC machine (Van Ginderachter, Kruth, 1998), and a holonic NC controller
(Tanaya, 1995, Kruth, 1996).
People involved in the Holonic Manufacturing Systems research at PMA.
Doctoral dissertations:
- Luc Bongaerts, PhD dissertation
Integration of Scheduling and Control in Holonic Manufacturing Systems
Abstract & Download
- Jo Wyns, PhD dissertation
Reference architecture for Holonic Manufacturing Systems - the key to support evolution and reconfiguration
Abstract & Download
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Copyright 1996, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Page design: Jo Wyns
Information provider: PMA Division KULeuven
Comments for the authors: Jo Wyns , Luc Bongaerts
http://www.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/pma/project/goa/holonic.htm