The umbrella paradigm underpinning novel collaborative industrial systems is to consider the set of
intelligent system units as a conglomerate of distributed, autonomous, intelligent, proactive, fault-tolerant,
and reusable units, which operate as a set of cooperating entities (Colombo and Karnouskos,
2009). These entities are forming an evolvable infrastructure, entering and/or going out (plug-in/plugout)
in an asynchronous manner. Moreover, these entities, having each of them their own functionalities,
data, and associated information are now connected and able to interact. They are capable of
working in a proactive manner, initiating collaborative actions and dynamically interacting with each
other in order to achieve both local and global objectives.
