The increasing market fluctuations and customized products demand have dramatically changed the focus of industry towards organizational sustainability and supply chain agility. Such critical changes inevitably have a direct impact on the shop-floor operational requirements. In this sense, a number of innovative production paradigms emerged, providing the necessary theoretical background to such systems. Due to similarities between innovative modular production floors and natural complex systems, modern paradigms theoretically rely on bio-inspired concepts to attain the characteristics of biological systems. Nevertheless, during the implementation phase, bio-inspired principles tend to be left behind in favor of more traditional approaches, resulting in simple distributed systems with considerable limitations regarding scalability, reconfigurable ability and distributed problem resolution.

This paper analyzes and presents a brief critical review on how bio-inspired concepts are currently being explored in the manufacturing environment, in an attempt to formulate a number of challenges and properties that need to be considered in order to implement manufacturing systems that closely follow the biological principles and consequently present overall characteristics of complex natural systems.