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

Collective intelligence in self-organized industrial cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) play an important role in the implementation of new Industry 4.0 solutions, acting as the backbone infrastructure to host distributed intelligence capabilities and promote the collective intelligence that emerges from the interactions among individuals. This collective intelligence concept provides an alternative way to design complex systems with several benefits, such as modularity, flexibility, robustness, and reconfigurability to condition changes, but it also presents several challenges to be managed (e.g., non-linearity, self-organization, and myopia). With this in mind, this paper discusses the factors that characterize collective intelligence, particularly that associated with industrial CPS, analyzing the enabling concepts, technologies, and application sectors, and providing an illustrative example of its application in an automotive assembly line. The main contribution of the paper focuses on a comprehensive review and analysis of the main aspects, challenges, and research opportunities to be considered for implementing collective intelligence in industrial CPS. The identified challenges are clustered according to five different categories, namely decentralization, emergency, intelligent machines and products, infrastructures and methods, and human integration and ethics. Although the research indicates some potential benefits of using collective intelligence to achieve the desired levels of autonomy and dynamic adaptation of industrial CPS, such approaches are still in the early stages, with perspectives to increase in the coming years. Based on that, they need to be further developed considering some main aspects, for example, related to balancing the distribution of intelligence by the vertical and horizontal dimensions and controlling the nervousness in self-organized systems.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Robustness Analysis of Holonic Multi-Agent Systems: Application to Traffic Signals Control

Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) provide a powerful tool to model distributed systems. Large-scale systems contain many autonomous agents, and therefore, the agents should be able to work in a group and collaborate toward common objectives. Holonic Multi-Agent Systems (HMASs) present a suitable organization, especially in large-scale systems. The idea behind HMASs is a division of a system into smaller sub-systems in a recurrent way. A holon is defined as a self-similar structure that comprises holons as sub-structures. Therefore, a holarchy is a hierarchy of holons that act as autonomous wholes in super-ordination to their parts and as dependent parts in sub-ordination to controls on higher levels. There are two main attributes for a holarchy, the first attribute ensures that holons are in stable forms, which are robust against disturbances. The second one confirms that the holons are in intermediate forms, which provide the proper functionality for the whole. In this paper, we study the robustness of a holarchy for traffic signals control. Robustness is an essential feature for providing reliable solutions, especially in real world applications. We show that holonic MAS can be effectively used for traffic signals control as a robust modeling method

Bio-inspired multi-agent systems for reconfigurable manufacturing systems

The current market’s demand for customization and responsiveness is a major challenge for producing intelligent, adaptive manufacturing systems. The Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm offers an alternative way to design this kind of system based on decentralized control using distributed, autonomous agents, thus replacing the traditional centralized control approach. The MAS solutions provide modularity, flexibility and robustness, thus addressing the responsiveness property, but usually do not consider true adaptation and re-configuration. Understanding how, in nature, complex things are performed in a simple and effective way allows us to mimic nature’s insights and develop powerful adaptive systems that able to evolve, thus dealing with the current challenges imposed on manufactur- ing systems. The paper provides an overview of some of the principles found in nature and biology and analyses the effectiveness of bio-inspired methods, which are used to enhance multi-agent systems to solve complex engineering problems, especially in the manufacturing field. An industrial automation case study is used to illustrate a bio-inspired method based on potential fields to dynamically route pallets

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

Skill-based reconfiguration of industrial mobile robots

Caused by a rising mass customisation and the high variety of equipment versions, the exibility of manufacturing systems in car productions has to be increased. In addition to a exible handling of production load changes or hardware breakdowns that are established research areas in literature, this thesis presents a skill-based recon guration mechanism for industrial mobile robots to enhance functional recon gurability. The proposed holonic multi-agent system is able to react to functional process changes while missing functionalities are created by self-organisation. Applied to a mobile commissioning system that is provided by AUDI AG, the suggested mechanism is validated in a real-world environment including the on-line veri cation of the recon gured robot functionality in a Validity Check. The present thesis includes an original contribution in three aspects: First, a recon - guration mechanism is presented that reacts in a self-organised way to functional process changes. The application layer of a hardware system converts a semantic description into functional requirements for a new robot skill. The result of this mechanism is the on-line integration of a new functionality into the running process. Second, the proposed system allows maintaining the productivity of the running process and exibly changing the robot hardware through provision of a hardware-abstraction layer. An encapsulated Recon guration Holon dynamically includes the actual con guration each time a recon guration is started. This allows reacting to changed environment settings. As the resulting agent that contains the new functionality, is identical in shape and behaviour to the existing skills, its integration into the running process is conducted without a considerable loss of productivity. Third, the suggested mechanism is composed of a novel agent design that allows implementing self-organisation during the encapsulated recon guration and dependability for standard process executions. The selective assignment of behaviour-based and cognitive agents is the basis for the exibility and e ectiveness of the proposed recon guration mechanism

Multi-Agent Pursuit-Evasion Game Based on Organizational Architecture

Multi-agent coordination mechanisms are frequently used in pursuit-evasion games with the aim of enabling the coalitions of the pursuers and unifying their individual skills to deal with the complex tasks encountered. In this paper, we propose a coalition formation algorithm based on organizational principles and applied to the pursuit-evasion problem. In order to allow the alliances of the pursuers in different pursuit groups, we have used the concepts forming an organizational modeling framework known as YAMAM (Yet Another Multi Agent Model). Specifically, we have used the concepts Agent, Role, Task, and Skill, proposed in this model to develop a coalition formation algorithm to allow the optimal task sharing. To control the pursuers\u27 path planning in the environment as well as their internal development during the pursuit, we have used a Reinforcement learning method (Q-learning). Computer simulations reflect the impact of the proposed techniques

Soft computing agents for e-health applied to the research and control of unknown diseases

This paper presents an Ontology-based Holonic Diagnostic System (OHDS) that combines the advantages of the holonic paradigm with multi-agent system technology and ontology design, for the organization of unstructured biomedical research into structured disease information. We use ontologies as 'brain' for the holonic diagnostic system to enhance its ability to structure information in a meaningful way and share information fast. To integrate dispersed heterogeneous knowledge available on the web we use a fuzzy mechanism ruled by intelligent agents, which automatically structures the information in the adequate ontology template. Our vision of how this system implementation should be backed by a solid security shield that ensures the privacy and safety of medical information concludes the paper

An agile and adaptive holonic architecture for manufacturing control

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. 2004. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Port