Holonic and multi-agent technologies for service and computing oriented manufacturing.

Summary This special feature aims at shedding light on new emerging holonic and multi-agent systems operating in a service-and computing oriented manufacturing environment, using the latest ICT technologies such as service-orientation, mobile agents, Web-and Cloud services, virtualization, big data and analytics to name a few. Industrials are seeking for models and solutions that are not only able to provide efficient overall production performance, but also to face reactively a growing set of unpredicted events. The demand for large scale industrial systems running in complex and even chaotic environments requires the consideration of new paradigms and technologies that provide flexibility, robustness, agility and responsiveness. Holonic systems are, actually by definition, targeting challenges that include coping with the heterogeneous nature of manufacturing systems and their on-line interactive nature in combination with competitive pressures. Multi-agent systems is a suitable implementing approach to address these challenge by offering an alternative way to design control systems, based on the decentralization of control functions over distributed autonomous and cooperative entities. Moreover, virtualization of manufacturing execution system workloads offers a set of design and operational advantages to enterprises, the most visible being improved resource utilization and flexibility of the overall solution. At the manufacturing execution system level, cloud computing adoption refers mainly to virtualization of MES workloads. While MES implementations are different and usually depend directly on the actual physical shop floor layout, the general MES functions are aligned with the set of functions defined by ISA-95.03 specification. To achieve high levels of productivity growth and agility to market changes, manufacturers will need to leverage Big Data sets to drive efficiency across the networked enterprise. There is need for a framework allowing the development of manufacturing cyber physical systems that include capabilities for complex event processing and Big Data analytics, which are expected to move the manufacturing domain closer to digital transformation and cloud services within the contextual enterprise. On the other hand, service orientation is emerging at multiple organizational levels in enterprise business, and leverages technology in response to the growing need for greater business integration, flexibility and agility of manufacturing enterprises. Close related to IT infrastructures of Web Services, the Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture represents a technical architecture, a business modelling concept, an integration source and a new way of viewing units of control within the enterprise. Business and process information systems integration and interoperability are feasible by considering the customized product as "active controller" of the enterprise resources – thus providing consistency between material and informational flows. The areas of Service Oriented Computing and Multi-agent Systems are getting closer, both trying to deal with the same kind of environments formed by loose-coupled, flexible, persistent and distributed tasks. An example is the new approach of Service Oriented Multi-agent Systems (SoMAS).