The Cambridge Packing Cell – A Holonic Enterprise Demonstrator Martyn Fletcher¹, Duncan McFarlane², Andrew Lucas¹, James Brusey², Dennis Jarvis¹ ¹Agent Oriented Software Ltd., Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1RX, United Kingdom. {martyn.fletcher, andrew.lucas, dennis.jarvis}@agent-software.co.uk ²Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1RX, United Kingdom. {dcm, jpb54}@eng.cam.ac.uk Abstract. Many modern manufacturing systems are highly automated and are now requiring decentralised ‘smart’ architectures to control hardware and manage the flow of materials / knowledge, in order to provide responsiveness. This responsiveness is needed to satisfy an ever increasing consumer need for goods that satisfy their unique requirements and are delivered to market both quickly and economically. A key route to achieve this mass-customisation with distributed control is to apply the holonic enterprise paradigm, and one manufacturing process that exhibits a high potential for responsiveness is packaging. Therefore this paper presents some of the main features of such an enterprise – the Holonic Packing Cell demonstrator being built at Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing. It must be emphasised that this cell is constructed from state-of-the-art industrial strength facilities to demonstrate a spectrum of responsive manufacturing ideas – it is not built from Lego bricks. 1 Introduction Traditional manufacturing control systems are hierarchical and are geared to mass production of low-variety goods. Often a schedule of the manufacturing operations on a given day is developed well in advance. As the schedule is executed, unexpected events, typical of many production, warehousing and supply chain environments, tend to invalidate the schedule and change how operations are managed. These events include introduction of rush orders, machine failures or handling of returned goods. Furthermore, in many of today’s markets people want goods that are customised to their specific needs and they are not prepared to wait long lead times for delivery. For example, people want to specify how to mix and match constituent elements of a product via a web page and have it presented to their door next day. In other words, manufacturing businesses are being pushed, by market forces, to provide mass customisation of their product families and to react more quickly to consumer demands. This means frequent changes to production equipment function