Abstract
This paper discusses a mechanism to ensure safe behaviors of HMSs (Holonic Manufacturing Systems). The change from low-variety high-volume to high-variety low-volume production requires highly flexible and adaptive manufacturing systems. Multi agent systems, in which decisions are made through cooperation among autonomous and cooperative elements, fulfill these requirements by exploiting full abilities of individual elements while eliminating various bottlenecks that exist in conventional systems. However, highly adaptive features induce non-deterministic behaviors of systems, and make it difficult to adopt multi agent systems as primary bases of manufacturing systems. In order to apply these systems to large and complicated applications, mechanisms that make their behaviors more predictable are essential. HMSs are a kind of multi agent systems, and an HMS safety ensuring mechanism proposed here is one of the attempts to make behaviors of multi agent systems more predictable.
