Building holonic control systems with function blocks

In today's global marketplace, people want highly-customised products to satisfy their individual requirements. However traditional manufacturing technology is not geared towards high-mix, low-volume manufacturing. Holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) is a new paradigm whose goal is to bridge this divide. HMS offers a migration path so manufacturing enterprises can continuously reconfigure themselves to manufacture a larger variety of products in smaller batch sizes, and do this profitably. Research into holonic manufacturing systems has established that such flexibility can be realized through a dynamically reconfigurable control system. A suitable metaphor for implementing the holonic control system is the emerging IEC function block standard. The paper describes how function blocks can be used to build such holonic control systems.