Developments in holonic production planning and control

The field of holonic manufacturing was initiated in the early 1990s to address the upcoming challenges for manufacturing operations in the 21st century. It is intended to support highly responsive organizations by providing a modular building block or 'plug and play' capability for developing and operating a manufacturing production system. The holonic approach can be viewed as an alternative to more hierarchical operations management methods such as those based on computer- integrated manufacturing (CIM). Since 1990, an increasing amount of research has been conducted in holonic manufacturing over a diverse range of industries and applications, with a strong emphasis on how holonic systems will perform the different planning and control functions required to manage a production operation. The planning and control work to date has, however, been focussed on specific problem formulations and solution strategies. The intention of this paper is to provide an overview of the use of holonic manufacturing concepts in production planning and control which is accessible to both practitioners and researchers in the area. The aims of the paper are as follows. To define clearly what is meant by a holonic manufacturing system and to demonstrate the relevance of its development to production planning and control. To motivate holonic manufacturing based on a business rationale, demonstrating specifically how it can support improved responsiveness and the management of production complexity. To review existing work in holonic manufacturing systems relevant to production planning and control, and provide an analysis of the scope and applicability of these results.