A Meta-Level Reference Architecture for Swarm Production Based on Holonic ARTI

A Swarm Production is a self-organising paradigm adopting reconfigurability and agility principles within a factory. Its potential spans diverse manufacturing applications by addressing implementation complexity at a factory scale. The self-organisation performed by autonomous mobile robot platforms restructures the topology of workstations on the shop floor to enable mass personalisation with order-specific production lifecycles. The transition between production orders requires specific spatial layouts, schedules, and control instances. It demands rapid reorganisation of the planning and control system’s logical, functional and physical components. The research contribution of this work is bridging the generic concept of Swarm Production with a holistic implementation via a reference architecture. The reference architecture builds upon principles of holonic manufacturing, Industry 4.0 and IIoT principles to define an implementation methodology leading to decentralised, heterarchical and cyber-physically enabled solution architectures supporting the Swarm Production. The multiform solution architectures serve a variety of stakeholders, including experts from business, software and production domains. The proposed reference architecture utilises scientific work within the Swarm Production paradigm. It inherits system architectures for a Topology Manager and Swarm Manager, addressing planning and control operations. The core of this reference architecture is an Activity-Resource-Type-Instance (ARTI) holonic architecture based on a digital twin concept, facilitating Swarm Production’s self-organisation mechanism.