Challenges and Trends in Distributed Manufacturing Systems: Are wise engineering systems the ultimate answer?

The growing instability of the business arena, advancements of the information and communication technologies, and increased competition determined manufacturing enterprises to change their way of pursuing business. As consequence, new paradigms for manufacturing engineering systems have emerged. The aim of this article is to present preliminary results of an inter-disciplinary (on-going) research and development project focusing on the design, specification, performance modeling and implementation of an intelligent self-healing selfadaptable self-improving manufacturing engineering system (named wise manufacturing system). Main manufacturing paradigms are briefly presented, emphasizing their main strengths and weaknesses. The proposed system architecture towards a wise manufacturing engineering system is introduced, underlying main challenges and open issues. A cost model is also presented.