Holonic Manufacturing Control: A Practical Implementation

The ADACOR holonic architecture for manufacturing control addresses the agile reaction to unexpected disturbances at the shop floor level, by introducing supervisor entities in decentralised systems characterised by the self-organisation capabilities associated to each ADACOR holon. The result is an adaptive control architecture that balances dynamically between a more centralised structure and a more decentralised one, allowing the combination of global production optimisation with agile reaction to unexpected disturbances. The validation of the proposed architecture is required to verify the correctness and the applicability of its concepts. This paper describes the implementation of ADACOR concepts using multi-agent systems, especially through the use of the JADE agent development platform.