Comparison of emerging manufacturing concepts

The current and continuing focus on agile manufacturing will pave the way towards organisational structures with very high operational flexibility and the ability of systems to transform their internal structure and technology as needed. A promising structure, in this respect, is a conglomerate of distributed and autonomous units which operate as a set of cooperating entities. We examine the emerging bionic, fractal and holonic concepts of manufacturing. After briefly describing their features a critical comparison is made between the concepts on their design and operational features. This comparison discusses some of the essential features including the autonomy of units and the types of regulatory mechanisms and adaptation requirements that need to be considered to properly manage the complex interactions that may ensue due to the distributed nature of these systems.