Holonic Manufacturing Systems Design and Analysis : Virtual Manufacturing Approach

The manufacturing industry has to respond to rapidly changing markets more often and much faster than ever before. This manufacturing competition has acted as a driving force for employing modern manufacturing systems to achieve agility. A key goal is to make the manufacturing equipment, associated information systems and control architecture of an agile manufacturing enterprise as responsive to the physical and logical disturbances as possible. Holonic Manufacturing Systems is one of the widely accepted approaches to counteract the above developments. The requirements analysis of such highly complex control systems is costly, time consuming, and requires a lot of experience to mitigate potential risks of failure. This book, therefore, addresses the issue of how manufacturing information can be modeled and verified in the design and implementation of HMS. The overall book recommends that the integration of VM into the manufacturing modeling helps to improve information requirements analysis for HMS implementation by allowing the user and the information support elements to be in direct relation with the operation of system in a more realistic environment.