Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

Towards autonomy, self-organisation and learning in holonic manufacturing

This paper intends to discuss self-organisation and learning capabilities in autonomous and cooperative holons that are part of a holonic manufacturing control system. These capabilities will support the dynamic adaptation of the manufacturing control to the manufacturing evolution and emergency, specially the agile reaction to unexpected disturbances

A Combination of Workforce Sizing Plan and Worker Selection Guide with the Holonic Control Paradigm

The Holonic Workforce Allocation Model (HWM) is a dual-level advisory model using the concepts of Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMS). The quantitative and pre-active level is termed as Workforce Sizing Plan (WOZIP), whereby the number of workers required for a production period can be forecasted. The resultant group of workers, in a case-by-case fashion, are continually assigned to parallel series of production tasks considering the individual skill and task urgency factors, at the qualitative and reactive level called Worker Selection Guide (WOSEG). When developing such an integrated model, four holonic control attributes need to be observed, namely real-time control, event-driven control, intelligent control, and distributed control. These control attributes help ensure the effective and sustainable improvement of factory processes, for which the strengths of and the interactions between holonic elements are discussed in this paper. Keywords: Holonic control, workforce sizing, worker selectio

A holonic approach to dynamic manufacturing scheduling

Indexado ISIManufacturing scheduling is a complex combinatorial problem, particularly in distributed and dynamic environments. This paper presents a holonic approach to manufacturing scheduling, which in opposite to traditional approaches, distributes the scheduling functions over several entities, combining their calculation power and local optimization. In this scheduling and control approach, the scheduling mechanism evolves dynamically to combine optimized scheduling, achieved by central entities, and distributed scheduling, improving its responsiveness and robustness

Towards Holonic Academia: The theoretical framework and literature review

The author is interested to develop a holonic model for the management of higher learning institutions. Though the idea of holons or holonic systems introduced by Arthur Koestler in 1967 has been adopted into many fields of study over these decades, it is still rarely attempted on educational management. Such a remarkable gap in past research motivates the author to come up with a practical model called “Holonic Academia” (HOLACA) that can help enhance university processes to survive the greatly challenging industry of higher education. By and large, the major processes within a university encompass strategic planning, operational management, academic research, teaching, and learning. There are four academic facets to be brought together in this particular research, namely psychology, pedagogy, rationality, and relations (2P2R). At the very outset of constructing the HOLACA, a critical review of literature is needed so as to map out the theoretical framework. Keywords: higher education, holonic model, literature revie

Design and implementation of a function block-based holonic control architecture for a new generation flexible manufacturing system

In this research work a control architecture which gives response to the requirements of new generation of flexible manufacturing systems in terms of flexibility, reconfigurability, robustness and autonomy is designed and implemented. To do so the main principles of the Holonic Manufacturing paradigm are applied using the IEC61499 function block (FB) technology. Unlike other similar research proposals, in this work FBs are not relegated to low-level control but are used to model manufacturing execution and control high-level control tasks. This is done with the objective of evaluating the viability of using FBs to develop holonic architectures in comparison to more established technologies like multi-agent systems. Moreover, the proposed control architecture also focuses on better integrating and exploiting the products’ information to enhance its flexibility and adaptability. For this STEP-NC (ISO14649) is used to model richer process plans which include manufacturing alternatives and could be easily integrated in the control itself

A Product Oriented Modelling Concept: Holons for systems synchronisation and interoperability

Nowadays, enterprises are confronted to growing needs for traceability, product genealogy and product life cycle management. To meet those needs, the enterprise and applications in the enterprise environment have to manage flows of information that relate to flows of material and that are managed in shop floor level. Nevertheless, throughout product lifecycle coordination needs to be established between reality in the physical world (physical view) and the virtual world handled by manufacturing information systems (informational view). This paper presents the "Holon" modelling concept as a means for the synchronisation of both physical view and informational views. Afterwards, we show how the concept of holon can play a major role in ensuring interoperability in the enterprise context

A Holonic Workforce Sizing Model Based on Demand Trend and Disturbance Rate in Job-shop Production

This paper presents a job-shop workforce sizing method developed in the light of Holonic Manufacturing System (HMS). As one of the management paradigms gaining attention worldwide, HMS represents a novel methodology that integrates computers, machines, and humans into a single function unit capable to cope with dynamics in the business environment. Over the decades, the concepts of holons and holonic systems have been adopted in many research fields, but they are scarcely attempted on labour planning. A literature gap exists, thus motivating the author to come up with a holonic model that uses exponential smoothing to forecast some quantitative variables in labour-intensive production. These varying parameters include the machine utilisation that reflects the demand and the worker absenteeism and turnover that constitute the disturbance. Collective equations are formulated to periodically compute the number of workers required. For model validation purpose, twenty-four-month data analysis is conducted on a mock-up basis

New Shop Floor Control Approaches for Virtual Enterprises

The virtual enterprise paradigm seems a fit response to face market instability and the volatile nature of business opportunities increasing enterprise’s interest in similar forms of networked organisations. The dynamic environment of a virtual enterprise requires that partners in the consortium own reconfigurable shop floors. This paper presents new approaches to shop floor control that meet the requirements of the new industrial paradigms and argues on work re-organization at shop floor level.virtual enterprise; networked organisations