It is current practice in manufacturing enterprises the policy of directly controlling all the phases of business processes, leading to an overwhelming amount of knowledge and competencies to maintain. From the Information System's point of view, these corporations had monolithic software architectures (e.g. Computer Integrated Manufacturing) with rigid control structures. Some recent trends in business in general, and manufacturing in particular, lead to new approaches regarding the organisation and software architecture, mainly through adopting distributed solutions. The paper presents several issues related to this new concept of Distributed Manufacturing Systems, its properties (e.g. autonomy) and behaviours (e.g. co-operation), as well as three different organisational models: Bionic Manufaduring, Fractal Factories, and Holonic Manufacturing Systems. A survey of existing work is presented and compared.
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