Modeling and reconfiguring intelligent holonic manufacturing systems with Internet-based mobile agents

A holonic manufacturing system (HMS) represents a new breed of intelligent shop-floor management technology for the production of artifacts that satisfy unique customer requirements. Flexibility is an essential characteristic of the HMS in order to manufacture high-variety low-volume artifacts. Autonomous smart entities called holons interact, via cooperation protocols, within a HMS to support the runtime reconfiguration demanded by such an agile shop-floor. This paper presents a framework to model and reconfigure, in real-time, the holons' abstract behavioral specifications through the application of Internet-based mobile agents. A tool is also described to convert these specifications into a corresponding implementation model (based on the IEC 61499 function block architecture) that holons can execute across an open network of controller devices.