Unified Ontology for a Holonic Manufacturing System

Abstract

Holonic manufacturing systems are formed by holons that are capable of behaving in an autonomous, cooperative, selforganized and reconfigurable way to adopt dierent structures under normal and emergency operating conditions. These holons possess: (1) a representation of the world in which they live, (2) a distributed and decentralized control unit, and (3) a coordination module. The object of interest of the present research is the conception of a unified ontology in manufacturing domain, that guarantees the requirements in the formalism of the knowledge model of a holonic system. Unlike the ontological models found in the literature, the proposed knowledge representation scheme integrates roles and behaviors, which are validated through a case study of a manufacturing cell from a university laboratory. The results show that by using a common vocabulary, it is possible to represent knowledge coherently so that all kinds of holons in a holarchy can exchange, share and retrieve information.

Keywords

• Sistemas y células de fabricación flexible e inteligente
• técnicas de control inteligente
• agentes
• arquitecturas de control distribuido y descentralizado
• sistemas de bases de datos