Abstract
The current need for flexibility, re-configurability and robustness are crucial reasons for moving to new distributed manufacturing paradigms. Approaches that inherit biological concepts, such as Holonic Manufacturing Systems and Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems, address this challenge. The self-organization concept offers an alternative way of designing adaptive systems, in which autonomy, emergence and distributed functioning replace preprogramming and centralized control. This paper discusses the benefits that bio-inspired theories can bring to the manufacturing world, and analyzes why in spite of their promising perspective their adoption by industry is extremely rare.

Abstract
Answering to the need to have innovative manufacturing control systems tailored to the current economical, technological, and customer trends, where dynamic and volatile environments prevail, adaptive holonic control architecture (ADACOR) aims to increase the agility and reconfigurability of the production system, contributing for the improvement of the enterprise competitiveness when it works in dynamic and volatile environments. The paper describes the implementation and experimental validation of an ADACOR-based holonic manufacturing control system in a real flexible manufacturing system, using multiagent systems technology. The results extracted from a set of experimental tests allowed to verify the correctness, applicability, and merits of the ADACOR concepts and also contribute to prove the applicability of multiagent systems in industrial environments.

Abstract
Distributed manufacturing control systems, such as Holonic Control Systems (HCSs), are difficult to apprehend and to design, due to the presence of many autonomous, concurrent and asynchronous activities. A formal specification methodology allowing to understand, to synthesise the system specifications and to validate the correctness of their models would play a key role in its design and later in its implementation. This paper presents an approach to the formal specification of HCSs based on high-level Petri nets. The proposed approach is tested in the specification of the ADACOR HCS. Copyright © 2006 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Abstract
Engineering frameworks are currently required to support the easy, low-cost, modular and integrated development of production systems, addressing the emergent requirements of re-configurability, responsiveness and robustness. This paper discusses the integration of High-level Petri net-based service-oriented frameworks with 2D/3D engineering tools, allowing the digitally design, configuration, validation, simulation, control and monitoring of production systems, in an integrated manner. An experimental case study was implemented, based on the Petri nets development toolKit (PndK) development framework, to validate the proposed concepts. © 2009 IFAC.

Abstract
The formal specification of agent-based and holonic manufacturing control systems assumes a critical role in order to understand and synthesize those complex systems. This paper presents the formal specification of the coordination models for the ADACOR holonic control system. For this purpose, it is used High-Level Petri Nets to model the behavior of individual ADACOR entities, AUML interaction diagrams to represent the interaction between those entities and mailboxes structures to synchronize the evolution of the Petri net models associated to the holons.

Abstract
Holonic manufacturing and multi-agent paradigms are suitable to support the actual challenges of flexible manufacturing systems, due to their decentralisation, modularity and autonomy features. The formal specification assumes a critical role in order to understand and synthesise those complex systems. The Petri Nets formalism is adequate to model and validate the dynamic behaviour, but present weak points when the system contains many instances of the same component, since the model grows (structure and components) in a noncontrollable manner. The use of High-Level Petri Nets, allows to reduce this complexity, by compressing the representation of states. actions and events, to overcome the identified limitations and to support more complex and bigger coordination scenarios. This paper presents a formal specification of the ADACOR product holons using High-Level Petri Nets and the associated formal validation of the model.