A holonic information exchange system for e-Manufacturing

Under the e-Manufacturing environment, a high-performance and secure information exchange system is essential. For securing those confidential business information and seizing business opportunities, the difficult and important questions (such as how to smoothly exchange the information of different formats among various departments of an enterprise and how to promptly fulfill information exchanging requirements among requests from the cooperative enterprises) shall be resolved thoroughly. Therefore, this paper proposes a Holonic Information Exchange System (HIES) to efficiently translate and dispatch extensive information of different formats among those functional holons within an enterprise, such as Communication Holon (CH), Data Warehouse (DWH), Holonic Manufacturing Execution System (HMES), and Holonic Enterprise Resource Planning (HERP). The corresponding supply chain information system is designed to adopt the communication specifications set by RosettaNet. Moreover, the major component of HIES, Exchange Holon, is designed to inherit the Generic Holon that possesses all the basic properties of a holon and was successfully developed in our previous work. In order to enhance the stability of this information exchange system, the HIES is empowered with the abilities of failure detection and function recovery for each message flow under processing and Exchange Holon itself. We believe that the HIES is one of the best solutions for an enterprise to efficiently and securely exchange and integrate internal information.