Dynamic Operation Environment – Towards Intelligent Adaptive Production Systems Eeva Järvenpää, Pasi Luostarinen, Minna Lanz, Fernando Garcia & Reijo Tuokko Tampere University of Technology Department of Production Engineering Tampere, Finland eeva.jarvenpaa@tut.fi Abstract—Today’s turbulent production environment calls for adaptive and rapidly responding production systems that can adjust to required changes in products, production volumes and unexpected failure situations. Holonic manufacturing systems aim to offer a solution for changeability requirements by providing self-organizing capabilities. This paper presents a concept of a holonic manufacturing framework and its implementation into a laboratory environment. The adaptivity of the presented holonic system rests on SOA-based communication and negotiation between entities through open interfaces, and matching of resource capabilities against product requirements. Keywords – Holonic Manufacturing System, adaptive system, capability mapping I. INTRODUCTION Nowadays production systems are characterized by short lifecycle times of products, small batch sizes, an increasing number of product variants and fast emergence of new technical solutions. Changing customer orders cause altering requirements concerning the output capacity and processing functions of the production systems. Today’s production systems need to be able to adapt rapidly to the required changes. Different manufacturing paradigms have been initiated in recent years to overcome these challenges. Reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) aim to meet these requirements by offering rapid adjustment of production capacity and functionality, in response to new circumstances, by rearrangement or change in their structure as well as in hardware and software components [1][2][8]. Agent-based and holonic systems take more dynamic approach to cope with the changeability requirements. The holonic concept was originally developed by philosopher Arthur Koestler in order to explain the evolution of biological and social systems. The word “holon” is a combination of the Greek word “holos”, meaning whole, and the Greek suffix “on”, meaning particle or part. Therefore the term holon means something that is at the same time a whole and a part of something greater whole. [7] Translated into manufacturing world the Holonic Manufacturing System (HMS) concept views the manufacturing system as one entity consisting of autonomous modules (holons) with distributed control. The holons are autonomous entities able to fulfil their own goals, as well as communicate with other holons and form set of holons, holarchies, through common interfaces and negotiation process. The objective has been to attain the benefits that holonic organization provides to living organisms and societies, in manufacturing, i.e., stability in the face of disturbances, adaptivity and flexibility in the face of change, and efficient use of available resources through self- organization ability. [4] This paper aims to introduce an unique implementation of holonic architecture in a real factory environment. The implementation is based on a DiMS (Distributed Manufacturing System) concept developed by Nylund and Salminen et al. [12] [15]. Since the holons need to be able to describe themselves to other holons, ontologies are used to formalize the knowledge related to the holons and services they provide. Ontologies give a standardized way to present knowledge from different domains and knowledge sources. The CoreOntology by Lanz [10] is used as a basis for describing the product, process and system related information. However, it has been extended for describing the capabilities of the resources and lifecycle information relating to resources and certain processes. The paper is organized as follows. Section II will introduce the basic theory behind the holonic manufacturing system framework. Section III will discuss about the method to describe and manage the resource capabilities and combined capabilities of multiple resources. Section IV will then describe the practical implementation of the holonic framework to the laboratory environment, including the description of the software system architecture and technical details of the holon implementation. Section V concludes the paper. II. INTRODUCTION TO THE HOLONIC MANUFACTURING SYSTEM FRAMEWORK DiMS (Distributed Manufacturing System) concept developed by Nylund et al. [12] [13] and Salminen et al. [15] is based on holonic architecture, where the holons are independently communicating entities. In DiMS the production environment is seen as dynamic and evolving open complex system, where the communication and decision making is based on negotiation process between these entities. The DiMS is based on the Product-Resource-Order-Staff (PROSA) reference architecture by Van Brussel et al. [17], which describes a manufacturing system with three types of basic holonic entities: resource holons, product holons and