Nowadays, a new generation of responsive factories is needed to face continuous changes in product demand and variety, and to manage complex and variant production processes. To such an aim, self-adaptive automation solutions are required, capable to adapt their control strategy in real-time to cope with planned as well as unforeseen product and process variations. In such a context, the present paper describes an automation solution based on a modular distributed approach for agile factory integration and reconfiguration, integrating a knowledge based cooperation policy providing self-adaptation to endogenous as well as exogenous events. The proposed approach is discussed through its application to a plant for customized shoe manufacturing.