Systematic approach for developing Holonic Manufacturing Execution Systems

The manufacturing industry needs highly flexible manufacturing systems to cope with the complicated manufacturing environment. To meet the above requirements, we adopt the concepts that were derived from a study of social organizations and living organisms, and translate them into a set of appropriate concepts, such as holon and holarchy, for manufacturing industries. Holon and holarchy possess the properties of intelligence, autonomy, cooperation, reconfigurability, and extensibility. Advanced manufacturing systems also possess the capabilities of security certification and error recovery. Based on these properties, a systematic approach is proposed to develop a Holonic Manufacturing Execution System (HMES) for the semiconductor industry. This systematic approach is started with systems analysis by collecting domain requirements and analyzing domain knowledge. Then the HMES Holarchy is designed by: constructing an abstract object model based on domain knowledge; partitioning application domain into functional holons; identifying generic parts among functional holons; developing the Generic Holon; defining holarchy messages and holarchy framework of HMES; and finally designing functional holons based on the Generic Holon. This proposed systematic approach provides a novel and efficient way to design HMES.