Industry today is facing the fourth Industrial Revolution, also called Industry
4.0, pulled by the market demand of shorter delivery time and product life
cycles, with increased product variety and smaller lot sizes, and pushed by
innovative technologies, such as Cloud computing, big-data analysis, connected
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), Internet of Things, and related services,
as well as autonomous robots and augmented reality. Industry 4.0 is an
industrial paradigm that is proposing to transform the traditional factories
into smart factories, which are more competitive, efficient, and productive.
The goal is the rapid introduction of new tangible products and intangible
products (services) into the market as soon as market and customer requirements
change. In order to achieve this goal, the production process itself
should be more agile and particularly correctly digitalized.
On the one side, Industrial competitiveness today means shorter product lifecycles, increased product variety, and shorter times to market and customized tangible products and services. To face these challenges, the manufacturing industry is forced to move from traditional management, control, and automation approaches towards industrial cyber-physical systems. On the other side, several emergent engineering approaches and related Information-Communication-Control-Technologies, such as Multi-Agent-Systems, Service-Oriented Architecture, Plug-and-Produce Systems, Cloud and Fog Technologies, Big Data and Analytics, among others, have been researched during the last years. The confluence of those results with the latest developments in Industrial Digitalization, Systems-of-Cyber-Physical-Systems Engineering, Internet-of-Things, Internet-of-Services, and Industry 4.0 is opening a new broad spectrum of innovation possibilities. The PERFoRM (Production-harmonizEd-Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) approach is one of them. It teaches the reader what it means when production machines and systems are digitalized and migrated into Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems and what happens when they are networked and start collaborating with each other and with the human, using the internet. After a Technology Trend Screening and beyond a comprehensive state-of-the-art analysis about Industrial Digitalization and Industry 4.0-compliant solutions, the book introduces methods, architectures, and technologies applicable in real industrial use cases, explained for a broad audience of researchers, practitioners, and industrialists
