A collaborative automation approach to distributed production systems

The new enterprise organizations, such as virtual enterprise and smart enterprise, require the usage of collaborative automation approaches, addressing the flexibility and dynamic re-configurability. Collaborative automation is a result of the integration of emerging technologies and paradigms like smart agent-based control technology, mechatronics, communication and information. This paper reviews the paradigms evolution from CIM to the collaborative manufacturing management and discusses how and why the holonic control architecture ADACOR is a typical architecture that exhibits the real meaning of the collaborative manufacturing management concept