A holonic manufacturing system, designed to realize agile manufacturing, must (be able to) integrate the entire range of manufacturing activities from ordering, through design, modeling, production, to delivery. These activities are performed at many distributed sites. In order to effectively integrate these distributed sites, this work adopts distributed object and mobile object technologies, RosettaNet implementation framework, as well as holon and holarchy concepts derived from studying social organizations and living organisms to develop a holonic information coordination system (HICS). The generic holon is first developed by adopting the technologies of the distributed object-oriented approach with common object request broker architecture infrastructure, n-tier client/server architecture, a knowledge base, and data warehousing to achieve the properties of holon, error recovery, and security certification. The communication holon (CH) is then generated by inheriting the generic holon. Finally, CHs are employed to establish HICS. The CH exhibits basic holonic attributes, such as intelligence, autonomy, and cooperation. Furthermore, the CH can handle partner interface processes, and data exchange by various data formats following the standards of RosettaNet business messages. The failure recovery mechanism of the CH causes HICS to be more reliable than legacy systems. As such, HICS can meet the future requirements of supply-chain information integration of virtual enterprises.Note to Practitioners-An HICS that handles the information flow of the supply chain is proposed in this work. HICS is composed of many communication holons (CHs). Any company that would like to use HICS to exchange information for enterprise integration may possess a CH. The CH is implemented with the Java web-start technology. Therefore, any company can download a CH from the web server via a web browser. The company is, then, able to communicate with other members throughout the supply chain. Accordingly, CHs are scattered throughout the Internet/intranet and each CH can act as both an information supplier and an information consumer. Further, because the CH adopts the RoesettaNet implementation framework (RNIF), any company that has the capability of RNIF can also communicate with the members in the HICS framework via RosettaNet business messages.

A holonic manufacturing system (HMS), which is designed to realize an agile manufacturing enterprise, must be able to integrate the entire range of manufacturing activities from market demands, design, modeling, production, through delivery. These entire activities are implemented by several distributed sites. In order to effectively integrate these distributed sites, we adopt distributed object, mobile object, and object web technologies as well as the holon and holarchy concepts derived from studying social organizations and living organisms to develop a holonic information coordination system (HICS). The generic holon is first developed to achieve the properties of holon, error recovery and security certification. Communication holons are then generated by inheriting generic holon. Finally, communication holons are used to establish HICS. Thus, communication holons have the basic holonic attributes, such as intelligence, autonomy, and cooperation. Further, communication holons can handle information sharing, coordination among enterprises and data exchange by different data format. It is believed that HICS can meet the future requirements of supply chain information integration for virtual enterprises.