Designing communication protocols for holonic control devices using elementary nets

A difficulty encountered when developing Holonic Manufacturing Systems (HMSs) is the need to place some or all of the intelligence associated with a holon on a small, low-powered device that has real-time constraints. This requirement must be balanced with the need to communicate with such a holon using standard, open, and sophisticated protocols. A possible solution is to split the functionality into two parts with a lightweight sub-holon on the device and an associated high-level sub-holon on a remote server. However a key difficulty is ensuring that the communication protocol between the two sub-holons is robust and reliable, while still allowing all the flexibility that is required in these types of applications. This paper explores the use of Elementary Net Systems as a basis for the specification of the communication and demonstrates that this provides a simple and robust basis for designing correct communication protocols in the case where communication is via a shared data table, such as the memory on an RFID tag.