IEEE Access (IF: 1.270)

SI: Key Technologies for Smart Factory of Industry 4.0

Submission Deadline: 30 September 2017

IEEE Access invites manuscript submissions in the area of Key Technologies for Smart Factory of Industry 4.0.

Due to the growing global economy and demand for customized products, the manufacturing industry has been transitioning from a sellers’ market to a buyers’ market. This transition requires deeper conversion towards manufacturing structures to handle the increasing production complexity. The smart factory of Industry 4.0 can provide a solution for handling the complexity through the establishment of intelligent products and production processes. Realization of smart factory will be possible with the increased adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Smart factory will make the interactions between humans, machines, and products become a highly competitive area for market capitalization. With the foundations of smart factory based on IoT and CPS, various system technologies and architectures have emerged over the past few years. Even though, the smart factory plays an important role in Industry 4.0, it faces many challenges including structural, operational, and managerial independence of the shop floor and enterprise constituent systems, interoperability, plug and play, self-adaptation, reliability, energy-awareness, high-level cross-layer integration and cooperation, event propagation and management, and industrial big data analysis.

This Special Section in IEEE Access will bring together academic and industrial researchers to identify and discuss technical challenges and recent results related to smart factory of Industry 4.0. To meet the requirements of smart factory, in addition to the need for new concepts and design approaches, improvements in the areas of standardized communication mechanism, efficient monitoring, effective and flexible manufacturing resource management, transparent data processing, better system scalability, and reconfiguration are required. The next industrial revolution is still in its early days, and a large part of the potential for value creation is still untapped. In order to achieve the economic goal chased by the markets, the key technologies for smart factory must be discussed and studied. Therefore, the topics considered for this Special Section will discuss the analytical capabilities that are required to capture the full potential of smart factory, ranging from embedded systems that are already existing in the bottom layer to some cloud techniques that have not yet been used in the top layer.

In general, Industry 4.0 includes the horizontal integration, end-to-end digital integration, and vertical integration. The vertical integration refers to the smart factory in the form of CPS or IoT. This Special Section in IEEE Access mainly focuses on the key technologies for smart factory of Industry 4.0 (e.g., industrial wireless network, industrial SDN, and industrial cloud) rather than all the domains of Industry 4.0. The topics of interests for this special section include, but not limited to:

Artificial intelligence and autonomous systems in smart factory

Smart agents and systems in smart factory

System engineering and human factors for Industry 4.0

Semantic technologies for manufacturing cyber-physical systems

Cloud computing techniques for smart factory

Cloud-assisted intelligent devices, e.g., cloud robotics

Wireless sensor and actuator networks

Information coordination and interaction

Industrial integration and industrial information integration in smart factory

Software-defined industrial internet of things

Machine learning and decision science models for data analysis

Tools and technologies for deploying and managing big data

Security in industrial networks

Security and privacy protection

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Associate Editor: Jiafu Wan, South China University of Technology, China

Guest Editors:

Min Xia, University of British Columbia, Canada

Jun Hong, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China

Zhibo Pang, ABB Corporate Research, Sweden

Bharat Jayaraman, SUNY Buffalo, USA

Fangyang Shen, New York City College of Technology, USA