A study on a real-time scheduling of holonic manufacturing system - coordination among holons based on multi-objective optimization problem -

Recently, automation of manufacturing systems has been developed, aimed at realizing flexible small volume batch productions. New distributed architectures of manufacturing systems have been proposed to realize more flexible control structures of the manufacturing systems for coping with the dynamic changes in the volume and the variety of the products and also the unforeseen disruptions, such as malfunction of manufacturing equipment and interruption by high priority jobs. They are called autonomous distributed manufacturing systems, biological manufacturing systems, and holonic manufacturing systems (HMS). The chapter proposes a new real-time scheduling method for HMS to consider both the objective functions of the individual holons and the whole HMS. In this method, all the pareto optimal combinations of the resource holons and the job holons for the machining processes are generated, based on the objective functions of the individual holons. Following this, a most suitable combination is selected from the pareto optimal ones, based on the objective functions of the whole HMS, such as the total make span and the total tardiness.