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

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

Enhanced cell controller for aerospace manufacturing

Aerospace manufacturing industry is unique in that production typically focuses on high variety and quality but extremely low volume. Manufacturing processes are also sometimes unique and not repeatable and, hence, costly. Production is getting more expensive with the introduction of industrial robots and their cells. This paper describes the development of the Flexa Cell Coordinator (FCC), a system that is providing a solution to manage resources at assembly cell level. It can control, organise and coordinate between the resources and is capable of controlling remote cells and resources because of its distributed nature. It also gives insight of a system to the higher management via its rich reporting facility and connectivity with company systems e.g., Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP). It is able to control various kinds of cells and resources (network based) which are not limited to robots and machines. It is extendable and capable of adding multiple numbers of cells inside the system. It also provides the facility of scheduling the task to avoid the deadlocking in the process. In FCC resources (e.g., tracker) can also be shared between cells

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

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

A holonic multi-agent methodology to design sustainable intelligent manufacturing control systems

[EN] The urgent need for sustainable development is imposing radical changes in the way manufacturing systems are designed and implemented. The overall sustainability in industrial activities of manufacturing companies must be achieved at the same time that they face unprecedented levels of global competition. Therefore, there is a well-known need for tools and methods that can support the design and implementation of these systems in an effective way. This paper proposes an engineering method that helps researchers to design sustainable intelligent manufacturing systems. The approach is focused on the identification of the manufacturing components and the design and integration of sustainability-oriented mechanisms in the system specification, providing specific development guidelines and tools with built-in support for sustainable features. Besides, a set of case studies is presented in order to assess the proposed method.This research was supported by research projects TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and TIN2016-80856-R from the Spanish government. The authors would like to acknowledge T. Bonte for her contribution to the NetLogo simulator of the AIP PRIMECA cell.Giret Boggino, AS.; Trentesaux, D.; Salido Gregorio, MÁ.; Garcia, E.; Adam, E. (2017). A holonic multi-agent methodology to design sustainable intelligent manufacturing control systems. Journal of Cleaner Production. 167(1):1370-1386. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.03.079S13701386167

Metabolism in eco-holonic manufacturing systems based on the living systems theory

The industrial metabolism has been conceived on the basis of analogies about the set of biochemical reactions (anabolism and catabolism) that occur in a living being and their flows of matter, energy and substances in natural ecosystems. This conception determines forms of appropriation and consumption of substances, materials and energy, from the natural environment (natursphere) and the technical environment (technosphere) for their transformation and subsequent elimination, under the articulation of criteria of cyclicity, toxicity and efficiency. The last aim of Industrial Ecology (IE), is materialized when the variety of industrial ecosystems is eco-compatible with the variety of natural ecosystems. The naturalisation of manufacturing systems is an effort to conceive them with variety similar to natural systems in order to achieve their eco-compatibility. In addition to bionic models from natural ecosystems in the field of industrial metabolism, several attempts have been made to design technical systems using bionic models from the Living Systems Theory (LST). The formulation of manufacturing systems based on living systems can be considered as a set of dynamic systems from Bertalanffy's perspective. In this paper is postulated an Eco-Holonic Reference Architecture for its projection in the design of manufacturing systems metabolism with an adaptive, self-regulating and required variety structure and with a potential toolbox in the core knowledge of the holon throughout its life cycl

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