The agility and the flexibility of the current shop floor control systems have been limited so far, owing to the lack of structural flexibility and agility in its control software layer. Most of them are based on traditional hierarchical architecture and the top down approach and depend structurally on their specific configuration and job scheduling. Not only can they hardly satisfactorily adapt to these increasing changes and disturbances, but also make the redevelopment and maintenance of shop floor control system (SFCS) to need high cost and much time. And SFCS based on the heterarchical architecture don′t provide a predictable and high performance system, especially not in the heterogeneous environments, where the resources are scarce and the current decisions have serious repercussions on the future performances. For this reason, the heterarchical control is hardly applied in industry. Obviously, it is necessary to develop a new structural framework of reconfigurable SFCS to improve their agility, flexibility and maintainability. This paper presents a holonic framework of reconfigurable SFCS based on holonic manufacturing concepts. The framework is composed of resource holons, product holons and other staff holons. The model of each holon and the co operative mechanisms of holons are described. To verify the proposed approach experimentally, a prototype reconfigurable SFCS for a flexible manufacturing shop floor producing discrete parts is implemented.
