Towards automatic operations on a shop floor, this paper proposes a task-oriented cyber-physical system (CPS) concept, called holonic CPS. Within the context, operation processes are separated and modelled independently, and machines are also divided into hardware and basic controllers. The elementary distributed entities from operation processes and machines are represented by holons including “Cyber” and “Physical” parts. A holon is designed in hierarchical structure involving agent, FB, controller and hardware from top to bottom, and a holarchy, a holonic network including relevant holons, is able to represent a task or a function on the shop floor. To show how the proposed holonic CPS works, a robotic application is designed, in which both assembly tasks and machining (grinding and polishing) tasks can be performed. Where a set of relevant holons and holarchies are presented, which provide a “library” as the basis to represent an ordered task. A microkernel architecture is designed to implement the holonic CPS. A major benefit under the holonic CPS allows the partial manufacturing operation to be transferred into computing issues.