Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are forcing major changes in the production styles and configuration of manufacturing organizations. Increasingly, traditional | Ulieru Michaela et al Architectures for Manufacturing Identifying Holonic Structures . Computational Intelligence in Manufacturing Handbook Edited by Jun Wang et al Boca Raton CRC Press LLC 2001 3 Holonic Metamorphic Architectures for Manufacturing Identifying Holonic Structures in Multiagent Systems by Fuzzy Modeling Michaela Ulieru 3 5 The University of Calgary Dan Stefanoiu The University of Calgary Douglas Norrie The University of Calgary Introduction Agent-Oriented Manufacturing Systems The MetaMorph Project Holonic Manufacturing Systems Holonic Self-Organization of MetaMorph via Dynamic Virtual Clustering Automatic Grouping of Agents into Holonic Clusters MAS Self-Organization as a Holonic System Simulation Results Conclusions Introduction Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are forcing major changes in the production styles and configuration of manufacturing organizations. Increasingly traditional centralized and sequential manufacturing planning scheduling and control mechanisms are being found to be insufficiently flexible to respond to changing production styles and highly dynamic variations in product requirements. In these traditional hierarchical organizations manufacturing resources are grouped into semipermanent tightly coupled subgroups with a centralized software supervisor processing information sequentially. Besides plan fragility and increased response overheads this may result in much of the system being shut down by a single point of failure. Conventional-knowledge engineering approaches with largescale or very-large-scale knowledge bases become inadequate in this highly distributed environment. 2001 CRC Press LLC The next generation of intelligent manufacturing systems is envisioned to be agile adaptive and fault tolerant. They need to be distributed virtual enterprises comprised of dynamically reconfigurable production resources interlinked with supply and distribution networks. Within .
