I would like to thank the SOHOMA Steering Committee for offering me the opportunity to share my views and ideas with the SOHOMA community and the manufacturing control and systems domain researchers at large. I worked in manufacturing control for more than twenty years and have witnessed the research progress of the domain from the first distributed architectures, including first holonic manufacturing systems models, to the myriad models for digital transformation of manufacturing through service orientation, and to the distributed intelligence models that are employed in what was recently called "manufacturing as a service" or shortly MaaS. The SOHOMA workshop, now at its anniversary tenth edition, has always kept with the times and even went through a few name changes to better capture the evolving nature of our work as a community. But, nevertheless, it always welcomed submissions from around the world covering cutting-edge manufacturing control modelling, promoted transformative research and moved forward the knowledge frontier. As confirmation, the last SOHOMA workshop held in October featured the overarching theme "manufacturing as a service-virtual-izing and encapsulating manufacturing resources and controls into cloud networked services" and, to name a few, included articles covering MaaS aspects such as cloud-based manufacturing control, digital twins in manufacturing, holonic and multi-agent process control, ethics and social automation, human factors integration, and physical Internet and logistics.
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