Conclusions and Outlook

Abstract

This edited book has presented a selected range of contributions, based on the results of the EU Plant Automation Based on Distributed Systems (PABADIS) and PABADIS based Product Oriented Manufacturing Systems for Re-Configurable Enterprises (PABADIS’PROMISE) projects: from methodological to theoretical to address the issues surrounding Distributed Manufacturing. The contributions neither claim to have completed all the research necessary on the field nor to be the final stage of development of principles, methods and instruments resulting from network thinking in manufacturing. It must be noted that the “distributed” perspective on manufacturing, implicitly introducing the modes of iteration, parallelism, emergence, behaviour and encapsulation, reveals a surprising number of novel functions, creates new problems for methodologists, and generates demands for better information and communication technologies (ICT) pervasion. However, for now this recognition can only partly result in coherent descriptions of relevant (interdisciplinary) contributions for Distributed Manufacturing.

This volume will not conclude without an attempt to synthesise all approaches outlined and to summarise key challenges that further research needs to address in Distributed Manufacturing and the implications that this way of interpreting manufacturing and resulting research has on practice.