Virtual approach to holonic control of the tyre-manufacturing system

Tyre manufacturers aiming to remain competitive in complex modern markets must promptly adjust to the changes within the production environment. With traditional tyre-manufacturing systems, a slow response during optimization of the manufacturing process and low-level adaptability to system disturbances is evident. The presented approach to virtual holonic control of the tyre-manufacturing system enables dynamic response in the event of new optimization demands, decrease of the impact of disturbances on system productivity and smaller future investments in the manufacturing equipment. The developed virtual manufacturing environment enables analysis of the manufacturing process, visualization of operations, management of simulation parameters of the operations and analysis of the control system behaviour within a virtual manufacturing system prior to the implementation of the suitable control approach into a real-life manufacturing system. This helps to avoid failures in the manufacturing system due to potential disadvantages of the manufacturing system structure or lack of coordination between control parameters. Evaluation of the holonic control approach implementation within the virtual tyre-manufacturing system is performed based on simulation tests for various scenarios, whereby system operation in stable and unstable condition is taken into account. At the end, analysis results are presented. By means of the virtual tyre-manufacturing system, optimization requirements in stable condition of the holonic control system can be achieved in real time compared to the optimization which is applied in the conventional control approach. In the event of a disturbance, the holonic control approach increases productivity compared to the conventional control approach. (C) 2013 The Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.