Living factory: back to koestler in holonic manufacturing

Abstract

Arthur Koestler 's observations about the similarities in the structures and behaviours of manufacturing environment, biological beings and social groups led to a new era in production design and control. However, the later research ignored the roots of the holonic idea.In this paper, we propose a new model which maps the structures and behaviours of biological cells onto the manufacturing environment, thereby turning back to Koestler. We describe the common organelles of biological cells and then provide corresponding manufacturing units based on a cell design being used in automotive industry. We claim that this model gives a more realistic, reconfigurable, scalable and reliable view of today's production systems. Furthermore, the availability of diverse biological structures offers a wide range of architectures applicable to different manufacturing environments.

Formal and modelling frameworks for Social Holonic Control Architectures

“…Between 1997 and 1999 has appeared a more inclusive vision, where human agents were as much as possible considered as full-part holons within the holonic models for system or architecture design [37,38,39,40]. At this point, we wish to raise attention on an approach which is neither explicitly human nor social-related: the transposition of biological structures & mechanisms to holonic manufacturing systems [41,42]. Still, from the implications of these is emerging the addition of social relationships to enhance previous holonic developments and structure new HCAs, these relationships being either derived from works in sociology or based on social behaviors observed into, for example, ant-colonies [43,44,45].…”

Reinforcement learning for procurement agents of factory of the future

“…In the shop floor level, introduction of holonic manufacturing allowed such a Structure [IO,11,and 121 where each holon is represented by a software agent. Despite the fact that holons originally are not restricted to being used only for shop floor activities, there are no applications of an upper level control unit based on holons.…”