The Holonic Manufacturing & Controls Concept
Presentation by Jim Barlow, President - Western
Reserve Controls
Market background
Trends
Current Technology/Architecture
Holonics Vision
Holonic Opportunity
Links
The Automation Market Background
$50,000,000,000+ world-wide market comprised
of three major segments/technologies
- Logic - primarily used in manufacturing plants
Automotive, packaging, material handling
- Process - primarily used in fluid process plants
Power plants, chemical, petroleum refining
- Motion - used everywhere
machining, electronics, entertainment
The Automation Market Characteristics
The ~ 10 multi-billion $ leaders include Rockwell, Siemens,
Honeywell and ABB.
There are also hundreds of small, specialty companies under $25M.
Other than sales channels, there is not much in between.
Historically, the automation market only offers proprietary,
closed solutions.
- Much of the product supplied uses embedded, real-time, closed-loop
software.
- PCs are used for operator interaction and engineering interaction.
- There tends to be a hard line existing between IT and controls
community with little direct connection between the two.
Automation Market Trends
Open networks include:
- DeviceNet - logic
- Fieldbus - process
- SERCOS - motion
- multiple variations of ethernet
- IEC standard for programming language
- lags commercial/IT practices
- Some attempts to merge motion/process/logic
Automation Market Issues
- product complexity vs. volume
- applications are potentially dangerous
- large vendors want to protect market position
- customers are betting their jobs and factories on their
selection of vendors and technology
- VERY CONSERVATIVE MARKET
HOLONICs OPPORTUNITY
Investment to jump start the technology
Participation automation tools, target market
OEM with proprietary technology to embed
Beta site/collaborator
Automation Object Repository - OONEIDA
Interested?
e-mail Jim Barlow: Jimb@wrcakron.com or
call 330-733-6662
Useful URLs for further reading
Small Business Trends: Holonics
Holobloc.com
HMS Consortium
IEC 61499 international standard
OOONEIDA
FIPA and the HCD proposal
Holonic Manufacturing
Parent organization: IEC
Working group: TC65/WG6
Goal: Standard model (function blocks) for control encapsulation & distribution
