In the future, manufacturing will be driven by increased competition, sophisticated customer demands and rapid advances in technology. It is therefore necessary to define methodologies for manufacturing that are capable of identifying the driving forces of change and coping with the resultant changes. In this paper, a survey has identified the present trends in manufacturing. Some manufacturing paradigms that have been proposed by researchers have then been investigated. The characteristics and enabling methodologies of these paradigms have been discussed. The criteria that justify a suitable manufacturing paradigm for the twenty-first century have been represented in a hierarchy model based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). This decision tool was used to identify the paradigm with the highest ranking for future implementation. In the last section of the paper, a sensitivity analysis has been carried out to observe the effects of varying the priorities of different criteria.
