Intelligent open architecture solutions for holonic manufacturing execution systems: Domain « key technologies for manufacturing» perspective

During the last decade, the Collaborative Manufacturing research domain has been associated with innovative solutions to challenges of modern manufacturing, namely dynamic changing of product catalog, distribution of resources, unexpected disturbances or heterogeneous manufacturing environments. They refer to interdisciplinary results covering all the production perspectives from organizational level — decentralization and autonomy, structural level — reconfigurable systems, and communication level — interoperability. This paper makes an assessment of the most interesting achievements on the collaborative manufacturing, based on the IMS2020 project roadmap key research areas, presented on three emerging approaches: holonic organization for mechatronic control; agent-based implementation for distributed intelligent control; service-oriented communication for coordination, cooperation and collaboration. Some details about the role of intelligent products/resources are explicitly presented. Finally, some conclusions on the state of art in the domain are inferred and some future research challenges are identified.