Dear Parag,

This article may help you understand this difference to some extent

Further to the responses already made, I suggest that while these terms may have subtle differences in meaning, fundamentally they have a common relationship to the trend of ever closer integration of the information systems used to manage engineering design information.

This field is changing as technology develops and in turn this will have a consequential impact on how people perceive and interpret terminology.

The three phrases (names) reflect the shift of attention on various system-level features (functional flexibility, information-based integration, supervised automation) of evolving complex production systems, which may largely differ in terms of their scale and practical implementation. On the other hand, largely different interpretations can be found in the literature and in the practice.

Thank you very much to everyone.