The scientific theme of the book concerns "Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS)" which is developed in a layered cloud networked manufacturing perspective, from the shop floor resource sharing model to the virtual enterprise collaborative model, by distributing the cost of the manufacturing infrastructure - equipment, software, maintenance, networking - across all customers. MaaS is approached in terms of new models of service-oriented, knowledge-based manufacturing systems optimized and reality-aware, that deliver value to customer and manufacturer via Big data analytics, Internet of Things communications, Machine learning and Digital twins embedded in Cyber-Physical System frameworks. From product design to after-sales services, MaaS relies on the servitization of manufacturing operations such as: Design as a Service, Predict as a Service or Maintain as a service. The general scope of the book is to foster innovation in smart and sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems and in this context to promote concepts, methods and solutions for the digital transformation of manufacturing through service orientation in holonic and agent-based control with distributed intelligence. The book's readership is comprised by researchers and engineers working in the manufacturing value chain area who develop and use digital control solutions in the 'Industry of the Future' vision. The book also addresses to master and Ph.D. students enrolled in Engineering Sciences programs.

This proceedings book presents selected peer-reviewed papers from the 9th International Workshop on 'Service Oriented, Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing Systems for the Industry of the Future' organized by Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, and held on October 3-4, 2019. The SOHOMA 2019 Workshop aimed to foster innovation in the digital transformation of manufacturing and logistics by promoting new concepts and methods and solutions through service orientation in holonic and agent-based control with distributed intelligence. The book provides insights into the theme of the SOHOMA'19 Workshop - 'Smart anything everywhere - the vertical and horizontal manufacturing integration, ' addressing 'Industry of the Future' (IoF), a term used to describe the 4th industrial revolution initiated by a new generation of adaptive, fully connected, analytical and highly efficient robotized manufacturing systems. This global IoF model describes a new stage of manufacturing, that is fully automatized and uses advanced information, communication and control technologies such as industrial IoT, cyber-physical production systems, cloud manufacturing, resource virtualization, product intelligence, and digital twin, edge and fog computing. It presents the IoF interconnection of distributed manufacturing entities using a 'system-of-systems' approach, discussing new types of highly interconnected and self-organizing production resources in the entire value chain; and new types of intelligent decision-making support based on from real-time production data collected from resources, products and machine learning processing. This book is intended for researchers and engineers working in the manufacturing value chain, and specialists developing computer-based control and robotics solutions for the 'Industry of the Future'. It is also a valuable resource for master's and Ph.D. students in engineering sciences programs.

The book offers an integrated vision on Cloud and HPC, Big Data, Analytics and virtualization in computing-oriented manufacturing, combining information and communication technologies, service-oriented control of holonic architectures as well as enterprise integration solutions based on SOA principles. It is structured in eight parts, each one grouping research and trends in digital manufacturing and service oriented manufacturing control: Cloud and Cyber-Physical Systems for Smart Manufacturing, Reconfigurable and Self-organized Multi-Agent Systems for Industry and Service, Sustainability Issues in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, Holonic and Multi-agent System Design for Industry and Service, Should Intelligent Manufacturing Systems be Dependable and Safe?, Service-oriented Management and Control of Manufacturing Systems, Engineering and Human Integration in Flexible and Reconfigurable Industrial Systems,Virtualization and Simulation in Computing-oriented Industry and Service.p>

This book gathers the peer-reviewed papers presented at the seventh edition of the international workshop "Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing - SOHOMA'17", held on October 19-20, 2017 and organized by the University of Nantes, France in collaboration with the CIMR Research Centre in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania, the LAMIH Laboratory of Industrial and Human Automation Control, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambresis, France and the CRAN Research Centre for Automatic Control, Nancy at the University of Lorraine, France. The main objective of SOHOMA'17 was to foster innovation in smart and sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems and in this context to promote concepts, methods and solutions addressing trends in service orientation of agent-based control technologies with distributed intelligence. The book is organized in eight parts, each with a number of chapters describing research in current domains of the digital transformation in manufacturing and trends in future service and computing oriented manufacturing control: Part 1: Advanced Manufacturing Control, Part 2: Big Data Management, Part 3: Cyber-Physical Production Systems, Part 4: Cloud- and Cyber-Physical Systems for Smart and Sustainable Manufacturing, Part 5: Simulation for Physical Internet and Intelligent & Sustainable Logistics Systems, Part 6: Formal Methods and Advanced Scheduling for Future Industrial Systems, Part 7: Applications and Demonstrators, Part 8: Production and Logistic Control Systems. The contributions focus on how the digital transformation, such as the one advocated by "Industry 4.0" or "Industry of the future" concepts, can improve the maintainability and the sustainability of manufacturing processes, products, and logistics. Digital transformation relates to the interaction between the physical and informational worlds and is realized by virtualization of products, processes and resources managed as services.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers presented at the 4th edition of the International Workshop "Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing - SOHOMA'14" organized and hosted on November 5-6, 2014 by the University of Lorraine, France in collaboration with the CIMR Research Centre of the University Politehnica of Bucharest and the TEMPO Laboratory of the University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambresis. The book is structured in six parts, each one covering a specific research line which represents a trend in future manufacturing: (1) Holonic and Agent-based Industrial Automation Systems; (2) Service-oriented Management and Control of Manufacturing Systems; (3) Distributed Modelling for Safety and Security in Industrial Systems; (4) Complexity, Big Data and Virtualization in Computing-oriented Manufacturing; (5) Adaptive, Bio-inspired and Self-organizing Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing and (6) Physical Internet Simulation, Modelling and Control. There is a clear orientation of the SOHOMA'14 workshop towards complexity, which is a common view of all six parts. There is need for a framework allowing the development of manufacturing cyber physical systems including capabilities for complex event processing and data analytics which are expected to move the manufacturing domain closer towards cloud manufacturing within contextual enterprises. Recent advances in sensor, communication and intelligent computing technologies made possible the Internet connectivity of the physical world: the Physical Internet, where not only documents and images are created, shared, or modified in the cyberspace, but also the physical resources and products interact over Internet and make decisions based on shared communication.

The book covers four research domains representing a trend for modern manufacturing control: Holonic and Multi-agent technologies for industrial systems; Intelligent Product and Product-driven Automation; Service Orientation of Enterprise s strategic and technical processes; and Distributed Intelligent Automation Systems. These evolution lines have in common concepts related to "service orientation" derived from the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm.

The service-oriented multi-agent systems approach discussed in the book is characterized by the use of a set of distributed autonomous and cooperative agents, embedded in smart components that use the SOA principles, being oriented by offer and request of services, in order to fulfil production systems and value chain goals.

A new integrated vision combining emergent technologies is offered, to create control structures with distributed intelligence supporting the vertical and horizontal enterprise integration and running in truly distributed and global working environments.

The service value creation model at enterprise level consists into using Service Component Architectures for business process applications, based on entities which handle services. In this componentization view, a service is a piece of software encapsulating the business/control logic or resource functionality of an entity that exhibits an individual competence and responds to a specific request to fulfil a local (product) or global (batch) objective.

The service value creation model at enterprise level consists into using Service Component Architectures for business process applications, based on entities which handle services. In this componentization view, a service is a piece of software encapsulating the business/control logic or resource functionality of an entity that exhibits an individual competence and responds to a specific request to fulfil a local (product) or global (batch) objective.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers which were presented at the 5th edition of the International Workshop "Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Man-ufacturing - SOHOMA'15" organized in November 5-6, 2015 by the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) of the University of Cambridge, UK in collaboration with the CIMR Research Centre in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics of the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania, the LAMIH Laboratory of Industrial and Human Automation Control, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambresis, France and the CRAN Re-search Centre for Automatic Control, Nancy of the University of Lorraine, France.The book is structured in seven parts, each one grouping a number of chapters de-scribing research in actual domains of the digital transformation in manufacturing and trends in future manufacturing control: (1) Applications of Intelligent Products; (2) Advances in Control of Physical Internet and Interconnected Logistics; (3) Sustaina-bility Issues in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems; (4) Holonic and Multi-agent Sys-tem Design for Industry and Services; (5) Service Oriented Enterprise Management and Control; (6) Cloud and Computing-oriented Manufacturing; (7) Smart Grids and Wireless Sensor Networks.These seven evolution lines have in common concepts, methodologies and imple-menting solutions for the Digital Transformation of Manufacturing. The book offers an integrated vision on complexity, big data and virtualization in service- and compu-ting-oriented manufacturing, combining emergent information and communication technologies, control with distributed intelligence and MAS implementation for total

Service orientation is emerging nowadays at multiple organizational levels in enterprise business, and it leverages technology in response to the growing need for greater business integration, flexibility and agility of manufacturing enterprises.

The "Service Oriented Architecture" (SOA) analysed throughout the book represents a technical architecture, a business modelling concept, a type of infrastructure, an integration source and a new way of viewing units of automation within the enterprise. The primary goal of SOA is to align the "business world" with the world of "information technology" in a way that makes both more effective.

The service value creation model at enterprise level consists of using a Service Component Architecture for business process applications, based on entities which handle services. In this view a service is a piece of software encapsulating the business/control logic or resource functionality of an enterprise entity that exhibits an individual competence and responds to a specific request to fulfil a local (operation) or global objective (batch production). The value creation model is based on a 2-stage approach:

"Agentification" complex manufacturing processes are split in services provided by informational agents which are discovered, accessed and executed. This leads to a modular, reusable, agile and easy integrate integration.

"Holonification" holons link the material flow and physical entities of the manufacturing processes with the informational part (IT services realized by distributed intelligence) facilitating thus traceability the developing of flexible control systems.

This book gathers contributions from scientists, researchers and industrialists on concepts, methods, frameworks and implementing issues addressing trends in the "service orientation" of control technology and management applied to manufacturing enterprise.

This book gathers contributions from scientists, researchers and industrialists on concepts, methods, frameworks and implementing issues addressing trends in the "service orientation" of control technology and management applied to manufacturing enterprise. "

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers which were presented at the third edition of the International Workshop Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing and Robotics SOHOMA 13 organized on June 20-22, 2013 by the Centre of Research in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics CIMR Bucharest, and hosted by the University of Valenciennes, France.

The book is structured in five parts, each one covering a specific research domain which represents a trend for modern manufacturing control: Distributed Intelligence for Sustainable Manufacturing, Holonic and Multi-Agent Technologies for Manufacturing Planning and Control; Service Orientation in Manufacturing Management and Control, Intelligent Products and Product-driven Automation and Robotics for Manufacturing and Services. These five evolution lines have in common concepts related to service orientation in a distributed planning and control agent-based industrial environment; today it is generally recognized that the Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture paradigm has been looked upon as a suitable and effective approach for industrial automation and management of manufacturing enterprises."

The scientific theme of the book is "Virtualisation - a multifaceted key enabler of Industry 4.0 from holonic to cloud manufacturing" which is addressed in the framework of cyber-physical system development. The book approaches cyber-physical systems for manufacturing with emergent digital technologies: Internet of Things, digital twins (based on the virtualization of production models embedded in the design, virtual commissioning, optimization and resilience of processes and fault tolerance of resources), big data, cloud control and computing, machine learning and cobots, that are applied in the book's chapters to industry and service sectors such as manufacturing, energy, logistics, construction and health care. The novelty of this approach consists in interpreting and applying the characteristics of RAMI4.0-the reference architecture model of the Industry 4.0 framework-as combinations of virtualized cyber-physical system elements and IT components in life cycle value stream models. The general scope of the book is to foster innovation in smart and sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems and in this context to promote concepts, methods and solutions for the digital transformation of manufacturing through service orientation in holonic and agent-based control with distributed intelligence. The book's readership is comprised by researchers and engineers working in the manufacturing value chain area who develop and use digital control solutions in the "Industry of the Future" vision. The book also addresses to master's and Ph.D. students enrolled in Engineering Sciences programs.

This book approaches its subject matter by promoting concepts, methods and solutions for the digital transformation of manufacturing through service orientation in holonic and agent-based control with distributed intelligence. The scientific theme of the book concerns "Manufacturing as a Service", developed by virtualizing and encapsulating manufacturing resources, activities and controls into cloud networked services in an open perspective that spans models from shop floor resource allocation to enterprise infrastructure sharing. The papers included in the application space have a profound human dedication and aim at solving societal needs serving the partnership of the future-people and industry in the era of Society 5.0. The book's readership includes researchers and engineers working in manufacturing, supply chains and logistics areas who innovate, develop and use digital control solutions and students enrolled in Engineering and Service Science programs.

This book gathers the peer-reviewed papers presented at the 8th edition of the International Workshop "Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing - SOHOMA'18" held at the University of Bergamo, Italy on June 11-12, 2018. The objective of the SOHOMA annual workshops is to foster innovation in smart and sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems by promoting new concepts, methods and solutions that use service orientation of agent-based control technologies with distributed intelligence. Reflecting the theme of SOHOMA'18: "Digital transformation of manufacturing with agent-based control and service orientation of Internet-scale platforms", the research included focuses on how the digital transformation, as advocated by the "Industry 4.0", "Industrial Internet of Things", "Cyber-Physical Production Systems" and "Cloud Manufacturing" frameworks, improves the efficiency, agility and sustainability of manufacturing processes, products, and services, and how it relates to the interaction between the physical and informational worlds, which is implemented in the virtualization of products, processes and resources managed as services.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers presented at the 11th edition of the International Workshop on Service-oriented, Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing Systems for the Industry of the Future, SOHOMA’21, organized on 18-19 November, 2021 by the Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology of Cluny, France in collaboration with University Politehnica of Bucharest (the CIMR Research Centre in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics), Polytechnic University Hauts-de-France (the LAMIH Laboratory of Industrial and Human Automation Control, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science) and Polytechnic Institute of Bragança (the CeDRI Research Centre in Digitalization and Intelligent Robotics).

The scientific theme of the book concerns "Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS)" which is developed in a layered cloud networked manufacturing perspective, from the shop floor resource sharing model to the virtual enterprise collaborative model, by distributing the cost of the manufacturing infrastructure - equipment, software, maintenance, networking - across all customers. MaaS is approached in terms of new models of service-oriented, knowledge-based manufacturing systems optimized and reality-aware, that deliver value to customer and manufacturer via Big data analytics, Internet of Things communications, Machine learning and Digital twins embedded in Cyber-Physical System frameworks. From product design to after-sales services, MaaS relies on the servitization of manufacturing operations such as: Design as a Service, Predict as a Service or Maintain as a service. The general scope of the book is to foster innovation in smart and sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems and in this context to promote concepts, methods and solutions for the digital transformation of manufacturing through service orientation in holonic and agent-based control with distributed intelligence. The book's readership is comprised by researchers and engineers working in the manufacturing value chain area who develop and use digital control solutions in the 'Industry of the Future' vision. The book also addresses to master and Ph.D. students enrolled in Engineering Sciences programs.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers presented at the 11th edition of the International Workshop on Service-oriented, Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing Systems for the Industry of the Future, SOHOMA'21, organized on 18-19 November, 2021 by the Arts et Metiers Institute of Technology of Cluny, France in collaboration with University Politehnica of Bucharest (the CIMR Research Centre in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics), Polytechnic University Hauts-de-France (the LAMIH Laboratory of Industrial and Human Automation Control, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science) and Polytechnic Institute of Braganca (the CeDRI Research Centre in Digitalization and Intelligent Robotics).

This book gathers the peer-reviewed papers presented at the seventh edition of the international workshop "Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing - SOHOMA'17", held on October 19-20, 2017 and organized by the University of Nantes, France in collaboration with the CIMR Research Centre in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania, the LAMIH Laboratory of Industrial and Human Automation Control, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambresis, France and the CRAN Research Centre for Automatic Control, Nancy at the University of Lorraine, France. The main objective of SOHOMA'17 was to foster innovation in smart and sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems and in this context to promote concepts, methods and solutions addressing trends in service orientation of agent-based control technologies with distributed intelligence. The book is organized in eight parts, each with a number of chapters describing research in current domains of the digital transformation in manufacturing and trends in future service and computing oriented manufacturing control: Part 1: Advanced Manufacturing Control, Part 2: Big Data Management, Part 3: Cyber-Physical Production Systems, Part 4: Cloud- and Cyber-Physical Systems for Smart and Sustainable Manufacturing, Part 5: Simulation for Physical Internet and Intelligent & Sustainable Logistics Systems, Part 6: Formal Methods and Advanced Scheduling for Future Industrial Systems, Part 7: Applications and Demonstrators, Part 8: Production and Logistic Control Systems. The contributions focus on how the digital transformation, such as the one advocated by "Industry 4.0" or "Industry of the future" concepts, can improve the maintainability and the sustainability of manufacturing processes, products, and logistics. Digital transformation relates to the interaction between the physical and informational worlds and is realized by virtualization of products, processes and resources managed as services.

The book offers an integrated vision on Cloud and HPC, Big Data, Analytics and virtualization in computing-oriented manufacturing, combining information and communication technologies, service-oriented control of holonic architectures as well as enterprise integration solutions based on SOA principles. It is structured in eight parts, each one grouping research and trends in digital manufacturing and service oriented manufacturing control: Cloud and Cyber-Physical Systems for Smart Manufacturing, Reconfigurable and Self-organized Multi-Agent Systems for Industry and Service, Sustainability Issues in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, Holonic and Multi-agent System Design for Industry and Service, Should Intelligent Manufacturing Systems be Dependable and Safe?, Service-oriented Management and Control of Manufacturing Systems, Engineering and Human Integration in Flexible and Reconfigurable Industrial Systems,Virtualization and Simulation in Computing-oriented Industry and Service.p>

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers which were presented at the 5th edition of the International Workshop "Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Man-ufacturing - SOHOMA'15" organized in November 5-6, 2015 by the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) of the University of Cambridge, UK in collaboration with the CIMR Research Centre in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics of the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania, the LAMIH Laboratory of Industrial and Human Automation Control, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambresis, France and the CRAN Re-search Centre for Automatic Control, Nancy of the University of Lorraine, France.The book is structured in seven parts, each one grouping a number of chapters de-scribing research in actual domains of the digital transformation in manufacturing and trends in future manufacturing control: (1) Applications of Intelligent Products; (2) Advances in Control of Physical Internet and Interconnected Logistics; (3) Sustaina-bility Issues in Intelligent Manufacturing Systems; (4) Holonic and Multi-agent Sys-tem Design for Industry and Services; (5) Service Oriented Enterprise Management and Control; (6) Cloud and Computing-oriented Manufacturing; (7) Smart Grids and Wireless Sensor Networks.These seven evolution lines have in common concepts, methodologies and imple-menting solutions for the Digital Transformation of Manufacturing. The book offers an integrated vision on complexity, big data and virtualization in service- and compu-ting-oriented manufacturing, combining emergent information and communication technologies, control with distributed intelligence and MAS implementation for total

This book presents the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region, RAAD 2016 held in Belgrade, Serbia, on June 30th-July 2nd, 2016. In keeping with the tradition of the event, RAAD 2016 covered all the important areas of research and innovation in new robot designs and intelligent robot control, with papers including Intelligent robot motion control; Robot vision and sensory processing; Novel design of robot manipulators and grippers; Robot applications in manufacturing and services; Autonomous systems, humanoid and walking robots; Human-robot interaction and collaboration; Cognitive robots and emotional intelligence; Medical, human-assistive robots and prosthetic design; Robots in construction and arts, and Evolution, education, legal and social issues of robotics. For the first time in RAAD history, the themes cloud robots, legal and ethical issues in robotics as well as robots in arts were included in the technical program. The book is a valuable resource for researchers in fields of robotics, engineers who implement robotic solutions in manufacturing, services and healthcare, and master's and Ph.D. students working on robotics projects.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers presented at the 4th edition of the International Workshop “Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing – SOHOMA’14” organized and hosted on November 5-6, 2014 by the University of Lorraine, France in collaboration with the CIMR Research Centre of the University Politehnica of Bucharest and the TEMPO Laboratory of the University of Valenciennes and Hainaut-Cambrésis. The book is structured in six parts, each one covering a specific research line which represents a trend in future manufacturing: (1) Holonic and Agent-based Industrial Automation Systems; (2) Service-oriented Management and Control of Manufacturing Systems; (3) Distributed Modelling for Safety and Security in Industrial Systems; (4) Complexity, Big Data and Virtualization in Computing-oriented Manufacturing; (5) Adaptive, Bio-inspired and Self-organizing Multi-Agent Systems for Manufacturing and (6) Physical Internet Simulation, Modelling and Control. There is a clear orientation of the SOHOMA’14 workshop towards complexity, which is a common view of all six parts. There is need for a framework allowing the development of manufacturing cyber physical systems including capabilities for complex event processing and data analytics which are expected to move the manufacturing domain closer towards cloud manufacturing within contextual enterprises. Recent advances in sensor, communication and intelligent computing technologies made possible the Internet connectivity of the physical world: the Physical Internet, where not only documents and images are created, shared, or modified in the cyberspace, but also the physical resources and products interact over Internet and make decisions based on shared communication.

This volume gathers the peer reviewed papers which were presented at the third edition of the International Workshop “Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing and Robotics – SOHOMA’13” organized on June 20-22, 2013 by the Centre of Research in Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Robotics – CIMR Bucharest, and hosted by the University of Valenciennes, France. The book is structured in five parts, each one covering a specific research domain which represents a trend for modern manufacturing control: Distributed Intelligence for Sustainable Manufacturing, Holonic and Multi-Agent Technologies for Manufacturing Planning and Control; Service Orientation in Manufacturing Management and Control, Intelligent Products and Product-driven Automation and Robotics for Manufacturing and Services. These five evolution lines have in common concepts related to service orientation in a distributed planning and control agent-based industrial environment; today it is generally recognized that the Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture paradigm has been looked upon as a suitable and effective approach for industrial automation and management of manufacturing enterprises.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Exploring Service Science (IESS), held in Bucharest, Romania, in May 2016.Service science constitutes an interdisciplinary approach to systematic innovation in service systems, integrating managerial, social, legal, and engineering aspects to address the theoretical and practical challenges of the service industry and its economy. The 45 full papers and 13 short papers accepted for IESS were selected from 119 submissions. The papers consider the topics service exploration theories and processes; modeling service requirements and management of business processes; value co-creation through knowledge management and user-centric services; service design methodologies and patterns; service innovation and strategy; IT-based service engineering; servitization in sustainable manufacturing; product-service systems; business software services and data-driven service design; web service design and service-oriented agents; IoT and mobile apps for public transport service management; e-health services and medical data interoperability; and service and IT-oriented learning and education systems.

This volume includes the Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region, RAAD 2015, which was held in Bucharest, Romania, on May 27-29, 2015. The Conference brought together academic and industry researchers in robotics from the 11 countries affiliated to the Alpe-Adria-Danube space: Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia, and their worldwide partners. According to its tradition, RAAD 2015 covered all important areas of research, development and innovation in robotics, including new trends such as: bio-inspired and cognitive robots, visual servoing of robot motion, human-robot interaction, and personal robots for ambient assisted living. The accepted papers have been grouped in nine sessions: Robot integration in industrial applications; Grasping analysis, dexterous grippers and component design; Advanced robot motion control; Robot vision and sensory control; Human-robot interaction and collaboration; Modelling and design of novel mechanisms and robotic structures; Robots in medicine and rehabilitation; Tracking systems and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles; Autonomous task learning, motion planning and scheduling.

The book covers four research domains representing a trend for modern manufacturing control: Holonic and Multi-agent technologies for industrial systems; Intelligent Product and Product-driven Automation; Service Orientation of Enterprise's strategic and technical processes; and Distributed Intelligent Automation Systems. These evolution lines have in common concepts related to service orientation derived from the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. The service-oriented multi-agent systems approach discussed in the book is characterized by the use of a set of distributed autonomous and cooperative agents, embedded in smart components that use the SOA principles, being oriented by offer and request of services, in order to fulfil production systems and value chain goals. A new integrated vision combining emergent technologies is offered, to create control structures with distributed intelligence supporting the vertical and horizontal enterprise integration and running in truly distributed and global working environments. The service value creation model at enterprise level consists into using Service Component Architectures for business process applications, based on entities which handle services. In this componentization view, a service is a piece of software encapsulating the business/control logic or resource functionality of an entity that exhibits an individual competence and responds to a specific request to fulfil a local (product) or global (batch) objective. The service value creation model at enterprise level consists into using Service Component Architectures for business process applications, based on entities which handle services. In this componentization view, a service is a piece of software encapsulating the business/control logic or resource functionality of an entity that exhibits an individual competence and responds to a specific request to fulfil a local (product) or global (batch) objective.

Service orientation is emerging nowadays at multiple organizational levels in enterprise business, and it leverages technology in response to the growing need for greater business integration, flexibility and agility of manufacturing enterprises.

The "Service Oriented Architecture" (SOA) analysed throughout the book represents a technical architecture, a business modelling concept, a type of infrastructure, an integration source and a new way of viewing units of automation within the enterprise. The primary goal of SOA is to align the "business world" with the world of "information technology" in a way that makes both more effective.

The service value creation model at enterprise level consists of using a Service Component Architecture for business process applications, based on entities which handle services. In this view a service is a piece of software encapsulating the business/control logic or resource functionality of an enterprise entity that exhibits an individual competence and responds to a specific request to fulfil a local (operation) or global objective (batch production). The value creation model is based on a 2-stage approach:

"Agentification" complex manufacturing processes are split in services provided by informational agents which are discovered, accessed and executed. This leads to a modular, reusable, agile and easy integrate integration.

"Holonification" holons link the material flow and physical entities of the manufacturing processes with the informational part (IT services realized by distributed intelligence) facilitating thus traceability the developing of flexible control systems.

This book gathers contributions from scientists, researchers and industrialists on concepts, methods, frameworks and implementing issues addressing trends in the "service orientation" of control technology and management applied to manufacturing enterprise.

This book gathers contributions from scientists, researchers and industrialists on concepts, methods, frameworks and implementing issues addressing trends in the "service orientation" of control technology and management applied to manufacturing enterprise. "