Infrastructures and scheduling method for holonic manufacturing systems

Manufacturing systems are changing structure and organisation. Supply chains are evolving to more coupled organisations like virtual enterprises, though maintaining the single entities autonomy, adaptability and dynamism properties. Such organisations imply organisational and technological shift through agility, distribution, decentralisation, reactivity and flexibility. New organisational and technological paradigms are needed in order to reply to the modern manufacturing systems challenges. The paper proposes and justifies the holonic manufacturing system concept as the main organisational paradigm presents the infrastructures needed to assure system operation, security, coherence and coordination. Additionally, the scheduling sub-system is presented along with a scheduling method developed as a case study.