A Layered Approach to Distributed Manufacturing

World-wide competition forces enterprises to achieve new cooperations and arrangements with other enterprises in order to share skills, using the virtual enterprise concept. The virtual enterprise introduces the distributed manufacturing concept, which can be expanded and zoomed to other distributed layers, such as multi-site and interacting units. The development and implementation of distributed manufacturing control systems, based in new distributed manufacturing paradigms, plays a key factor in the improvement of the enterprises capacity to react to market and organisation changes. This paper gives an overview of manufacturing paradigms and describes the evolution of control architectures, from the classical approach to the distributed approaches. The new paradigms for distributed manufacturing control, in order to prepare the next generation of manufacturing systems requirements, are also presented, with special attention to three concepts: Holonic, Biological and Fractal Manufacturing Systems.