Systematic approach for developing holonic manufacturing execution systems

As the demand for new products to have various functions increases and only small quantity of products are required, also as the competition pressure continues to grow, the manufacturing industry needs a highly flexible manufacturing system to cope with the complicated manufacturing environment. To meet the above requirements, we adopt the concepts that were derived from the study of social organizations and living organisms, and translate them into a set of appropriate concepts, such as holon and holarchy, for manufacturing industries. Holon and holarchy possess the properties of intelligence, autonomy, cooperation, reconfigurability, and extensibility. Besides, advanced manufacturing systems shall also possess the capabilities of security certification and error recovery. Based on these properties, in this paper, a systematic approach is proposed to develop a Holonic Manufacturing Execution System (HMES) for semiconductor industry. This systematic approach is started with system analysis by collecting domain requirements and analyzing domain knowledge. Then the HMES Holarchy is designed by the process of constructing abstract object model based on domain knowledge; partitioning application domain into functional holons; identifying generic parts among functional holons; developing the Generic Holon: defining holarchy messages and holarchy framework of HMES; and finally designing functional holons based on the Generic Holon. It is believed that this proposed systematic approach provides a novel and efficient way to design HMES.