Industry faces major challenges as product lifecycles shorten, product variability increases, and global markets become more volatile. To remain competitive, production facilities and equipment must be adaptable to respond quickly and efficiently to these changes.

A key success factor in achieving these goals is the control and automation infrastructure. New distributed architectures are a possible approach to address these requirements. New interaction and communication patterns as well as new ways of programming automation systems consisting of networked control units are required.

Mastering variability and complexity in cyber-physical production systems also requires new software engineering methods and tools, particularly for variability modeling and product configuration as well as to support maintenance and evolution.