I. Introduction
In recent times, industrial automation domain, and more specifically integrated manufacturing subdomain, has deeply felt the effects of globalization on all its different layers [1]. The consumer is continuously demanding for high-quality and highly customized products at low cost, with a minimum time-to-market delay [2]. To cope with this new reality and achieve a competitive advantage over competitors, future productions systems must provide solutions to the following known issues.
Long time for system design, commissioning and setup.
Complex and time-consuming reengineering phase to trail requirements variations.
Inflexible centralized/hierarchical implementations.
Scalability involves exponential complexity.
No default fault-tolerance or redundancy.
Incompatibility between different vendors equipment and legacy systems.
Shop floor isolated from higher level business Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).