Modern automation systems are asked to provide a step change toward flexibility and reconfigurability to cope with increasing demand for fast changing and highly fragmented production-which is more and more characterising the manufacturing sector. This reflects in the transition from traditional hierarchical and centralised control architecture to adaptive distributed control systems, being the latter capable of exploiting also knowledge-based strategies toward collaborating behaviours. The chapter intends to investigate such topics, by outlining major challenges and proposing a possible approach toward their solution, founded on autonomous, self-declaring, knowledge-based and heterarchically collaborating control modules. The benefits of the proposed approach are discussed and demonstrated in the field of re-manufacturing of electronic components, with specific reference to a pilot plant for the integrated End-Of-Life management of mechatronic products. 4.1 Scientific and Industrial Motivations Since several years, the manufacturing industry has been facing a number of technological and production challenges related to the increasing variability of mix and demand of products driven by a short product life cycle. Nevertheless, the growing industrial demand for increased levels of reconfigurability-having impact both in production process automation, supervision and data collection and aggregation systems-is not properly fulfilled, mainly due to the lack of widely accepted solutions