Enhancing ADACOR with biology insights towards reconfigurable manufacturing systems

Traditional centralized manufacturing structures were found inadequate to face the challenging requirements of flexibility and re-configurability. Lately, several manufacturing paradigms were introduced to face this challenge, being unified in the objective of providing decentralized control over distributed entities. In spite of their potential benefits, some important questions are far from been answered, namely how control structures are dynamically formed and evolved and how to combine adaptation and optimization. This paper introduces the main principles for re-configurable manufacturing systems that answers to these questions, based on the ADACOR holonic architecture and incorporating mechanisms inspired in other areas of science, notably biology, nature, theory of complexity and artificial life.