Special issue on ‘Cyber-physical product creation for Industry 4.0’

Industry 4.0 has become a synonym for a vision of future product creation and production engineering environments in which networks of horizontally and vertically integrated smart design and manufacture systems will be the norm. With the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) and its Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) as a backbone, game-changing new ways of product design and manufacture in a hyper-connected globalised world are emerging. In addition, a new and rapidly growing industrial service-sector focusing on Product-Service-Systems has begun to form.

Some of the challenges in realising the overall vison of Industry 4.0 concern the integration, management, control and communication of cyber-physical production engineering systems, the integration of state-of-the-art technology with legacy systems, data security and broader cyber-security aspects, as well as national and international public policy issues. Lastly, given the profound impact of this so-called 4th Industrial Revolution on society as a whole, the changing landscape of tomorrow’s job market and hence the training and education of the next generation workforce need to be addressed as well.

In ‘Synchronization for Smart Factory – Towards IoT Enabled Mechanisms’, the authors explore the advantages that CPS can bring for synchronising the production within one batch (horizontal) and across different stages (vertical) in a modern smart factory.

‘Cloud-based manufacturing process monitoring for smart diagnosis services’ investigates the benefits that the connectedness of the smart factory can bring to monitoring and diagnosis services. The author proposes a framework for online monitoring and a smart diagnosis service across different levels in the production system.

In ‘Communication method for manufacturing services in a cyber–physical manufacturing cloud’, the authors focus on providing a communication framework based on agents to allow collaboration and high level robust information exchange in the cyber-physical manufacturing cloud.

‘Interoperability in cloud manufacturing: a case study on private cloud structure for SMEs’ explores the implications of the heterogeneity of the cloud manufacturing environment and the authors identify interoperability as a major challenge. The private cloud is proposed as a potential solution and a prototype interoperable system is designed, implemented and validated to show the advantages over the existing generation of IT systems.

Finally, in ‘Setting production capacities for production agents making selfish routing decisions’ the authors tackle the challenge of planning of the smart factory and propose a new method that allows the trade-off between flexibility and cost to be explored in capacity dimensioning of the system.

This collection of papers presents the latest research on various aspects of smart manufacturing from interoperability, communication and data exchange to planning, monitoring and decision taking in a cyber-physical smart manufacturing environment. In the context of Cyber-Physical Product Creation, this provides a suitable platform for future research and a framework for consideration of new use cases for smart manufacturing.