HOLONIC DIGITALIZATION OF MANUFACTURING – THE TOOL OF 4-TH MANUFACTURING REVOLUTION

Abstract

Nowadays increased expectations regarding the industrial processes combined with the outstanding progress in the field of computers and information technology have led to the occurrence and development of the Industry 4.0 concept. The currently accepted meaning of digitalization is the use of digital technologies to transform an object/process in order to provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. Industry 4.0 means the entrance of industrial manufacturing into the digitalization era. This paper intends to be a contribution to the implementation of Europe’s strategy for digitalization and proposes the holonic digitalization concept introduced in manufacturing and tailored for supporting the development of the 4th industrial revolution. The implementation of manufacturing holonic digitalization consists of the accomplishment of the following four steps: sampling, holonization, digital representation of the holons, and building of holon dataset. Holonization of the manufacturing activity means its deep multi-level configuration into several stand-alone components, each component being a holon of manufacturing i.e., a sequence of manufacturing seen as a holon. The digital description of a holon refers to both holon attributes and causality, and it is obtained by holistic monitoring of the holon operation. The building of holonic cyber-tooling means to design both the flow of information and the decision-making procedure, and to build perennial cyber-tools needed to support the flow and procedure. This building lays on approaching the information processing as a decision-making process, and on the implementation of appropriate performant digital technologies.