Increasing complexity of today's manufacturing environment calls for p
owerful modelling tools that inherently support hierarchy, concurrency
, nondeterminism and several other features which are the hallmark of
all discrete event systems. This paper brings to the focus some of the
recently emerging modelling paradigms which hold a lot of promise in
modelling such complex real-world systems, and urges the IEEE communit
y to vigorously pursue research in this direction.