Figure: Structure and Relationship among the Basic Holons of a Holonic Manufacturing System

Staff Holon

The function of staff holon is to support other holons along with advice. The staff holon have supporting activities, as like: process planner, scheduler, and manufacturing resource planning.

Staff holon play an recommended role for the basic holon. While there are no disturbances or modifies in the environment, an HMS can be configured hence the basic holons strictly follow the advice of staff holons in a hierarchical way. Although, in presence of disturbances and modifies hierarchical staff holons execute poorly. In this condition, their advice may be avoided and basic holons may acquire autonomous decisions, and carry on their work. An example scenario may be illustrated as follows:

Product  holons  are  formed  via  taking  in  account  the  future  and  practical  market demands. They themselves make a decision how the product can be produced from the flexible set of holons.  They  possess  each  technical  information,  that  is  necessary  for  the production of an order. In the system, after the advent of an order holon, this will first identify its need through the pertinent product holon. The order holon will negotiate along with all the relevant resource holons to perform instructions pertaining to the manufacturing system's control parameter.   Thus, the order holon seen after the logistics aspect associated to the resource allocation. In the starting stage of an operation, the order holon forces the  resource holons  and  the  product  holons  to  cooperate hence  they  can  execute technical part of the operation. The relationship amongst the three basic agents is demonstrated in following figure.

                          Figure: Structure and Relationship among the Basic Holons of a Holonic Manufacturing System