Today’s production environment is characterized by an ongoing increase in complexity. Escalating product complexity leads to a more difficult design of manufacturing systems. At the same time, companies have to focus on their core competencies that force the growth of complex production networks being hard to handle. Additionally to the environment based by crises and peak stages, there is a trend of shorter product life cycles. Indeed, new technologies as RFID establish new innovative approaches for information acquisition in manufacturing, but in spite of technological progress, it pushes existing IT systems to its performance limits. Decentralized systems are supposed to remedy those problems, but despite of the scientifically proven performance those systems are only applied seldom due to missing transparency and possibilities of manipulation. Biomimetic approaches have great potential for optimizing processes and structures of manufacturing systems decentrally.
