Exploring the Development of Research, Technology and Business of Machine Tool Domain in New-Generation Information Technology Environment Based on Machine Learning

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

An interesting survey of the current situation of emerging technologies on the machine-tool sector is presented in this paper. The presentation of the results is merely qualitative, and some doubts arise about the usefulness of the results. Still, the survey is good, and although the conclusions do not provide quantitative indicators, I believe it can be interesting for potential readers.

Minor correction: please go deeper on the reasons why quantitative analysis has not been performed

Author Response

Comments: An interesting survey of the current situation of emerging technologies on the machine-tool sector is presented in this paper. The presentation of the results is merely qualitative, and some doubts arise about the usefulness of the results. Still, the survey is good, and although the conclusions do not provide quantitative indicators, I believe it can be interesting for potential readers.

Minor correction: please go deeper on the reasons why quantitative analysis has not been performed

Authors’ Answer: We honestly and warmly thank the referee for the comments. At present, we do not provided quantitative indicators in conclusions. The reason is as follows: this paper emphasizes the inductive description of existing development status of machine tool based on analysis of historical scientific literature and does not emphasize causality. In fact, this paper proposed an integrated quantitative analysis framework combining machine learning, bibliometric, trend analysis and patent analysis to mine multi-source scientific literature within the machine tool domain, including papers, funds, patents and news. The advantage of the proposed framework is that it has the capabilities of semantic, time dynamic and multi-dimensional quantitative analysis. Through the integrated framework, we can explore development status of machine tool from the multi-view perspectives of research, technology development and business mode based on quantitative analysis results of multi-source literature related to machine tool. This paper aims at the inductive description of current development status of machine tool. As a result, we draw the conclusions about current development of machine tool directly which have been revealed in the quantitative analysis results of papers, funds, patents and news. The obtained conclusions in experiment are supported by quantitative analysis results of multi-source literature in machine tool and we do not provide quantitative indicators. For example, we conclude current research concerns in machine tool based on the topic modeling results of papers and investigate the emerging technologies in machine tool by trend analysis of extracted research concerns. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors

Your study and your manuscript are excellent, but the connection to Sustainability is very weak. Unfortunately, this means that you either need to substantially improve the manuscript or submit it to another journal. If you are going to continuing to aim to have it published in Sustainability, you need to start at the beginning of the manuscript by revising the title to e.g. Exploring sustainability implications for future machine tool sector. Then, you should rewrite the manuscript around sustainability implications. One issue is how can more machine tools be reconciled with e.g. Green Growth when more machine tools involves more extraction of finite raw materials. Then there are circular economy topics such as refurbishing machine tools, new machine tools for remanufacturing. My recommendation is that you submit your manuscript as it is to another mdpi journal, then prepare a follow on manuscript for Sustainability that is focused on sustainability.

Author Response

Comments: Your study and your manuscript are excellent, but the connection to Sustainability is very weak. Unfortunately, this means that you either need to substantially improve the manuscript or submit it to another journal. If you are going to continuing to aim to have it published in Sustainability, you need to start at the beginning of the manuscript by revising the title to e.g. Exploring sustainability implications for future machine tool sector. Then, you should rewrite the manuscript around sustainability implications. One issue is how can more machine tools be reconciled with e.g. Green Growth when more machine tools involves more extraction of finite raw materials. Then there are circular economy topics such as refurbishing machine tools, new machine tools for remanufacturing. My recommendation is that you submit your manuscript as it is to another mdpi journal, then prepare a follow on manuscript for Sustainability that is focused on sustainability.

Authors’ Answer: Thanks for the constructive comment. According to the comment, we have modified the original manuscript to strengthen the relationship between this manuscript and Sustainability. In fact, the relationship between this manuscript and Sustainability is mainly reflected in the following two aspects. Firstly, the explosive growth of the new-generation information technology and the deep integration with manufacturing technology have triggered major and profound changes in the manufacturing technical systems, development paths and industry modes. Under this background, in light of machine tool is the basis of virtually everything that is manufactured in industry, exploring development of machine tool domain is of great significance to identify the opportunity to develop manufacturing industry and promote the sustainable development of manufacturing. Secondly, considering the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the current tightening constraints of resource environment it is critical to analyze the development of machine tool domain systematically from multi-perspectives that include research, technology development and industry for providing inspirations about the direction of sustainable development of machine tool. However, early manuscript focused on the emerging changes in the machine tool domain, but neglected the discussion of the relatedness between these emerging changes and the sustainable development of machine tools. In the revised manuscript, we highlight the links between emerging changes in analysis and the sustainability of machine tools. Specifically, we made the following modifications.

1)       At the beginning of the manuscript, we have rewritten the section of Abstract to emphasize the two important meanings about sustainability of this study. One meaning is as follows. In light of machine tool is the basis of virtually everything that is manufactured in industry, exploring development of machine tool domain is of great significance to identify the opportunity to develop manufacturing industry and promote the sustainable development of manufacturing in the current tightening constraints of resource environment. The other meaning is that the integration of above various analytical methods and multi-dimensional mining of literature enabled analyzing the development of machine tool domain systematically from multi-perspectives that include research, technology development and industry to provide inspirations about the direction of sustainable development of this domain.

2)       We have modified the first paragraph in the section of Introduction to highlight the meaning of the analysis in this study to sustainable development of machine tool domain.

3)       We have modified the second paragraph in section 4.1.3 to clarify the role of intelligent machine tools in promoting the sustainable development of machine tools. In addition, we have strengthened the discussion of sustainable development of machine tools in the second paragraph in section 4.1.4. Furthermore, we have added the third paragraph in section 4.2.2 to discuss the sustainable development of machine tools from the perspective of technological development. As for section 4.3, the original content has pointed out the significance of business model to the sustainable development of machine tools.

4)       We have rewritten the section 4.4 to discuss the inspirations of the emerging information technologies integration to the sustainable development of machine tool domain. Firstly, we make a deep joint analysis of machine tool development merging multi-perspectives such as research, technology development and business. We reveal the evolutionary logic of the emerging changes in the current machine tool domain under the influence of the new-generation information technology. Based on this, we provide inspiration about the direction of sustainable development in machine tool. Specifically, the continuous studies and applications of IoT technology has established a circulation pipeline for big data and knowledge in the machine tool domain. The exploration and landing of big data technology provide a new source of domain knowledge in the field of machine tools. In the future, knowledge of the machine tool field is not only derived from people, but more knowledge will be automatically generated from machine tool big data. The application of artificial intelligence methods will provide a powerful tool for domain knowledge mining. The cloud-based IoT ecosystem will make the transfer and sharing of domain knowledge in machine tool more convenient and greatly improve the reusability of domain knowledge. Ultimately, the synergy of these emerging technologies in machine tool will greatly change the existing paradigm of machine maintenance and condition monitoring, making remote operation and maintenance, predictive fault diagnosis and states online monitoring possible. The changes generated by these emerging technologies will be further extended to the full range of technical activities such as machine tool design, manufacturing, and after-sales. This will greatly reduce the cost of machine tool production, improve processing quality and processing efficiency of parts. Under the increasingly tight resource environment, the machine tool industry must shift to high quality development. The conclusions of this paper provide some inspiration for the future sustainable development of the machine tool industry. It is critical to realize the green manufacturing of machine tools by relying on the synergy of the new-generation information technology.

At the key nodes in the development of machine tools industry, making accurate judgments on development opportunities and implementing correct strategies have a decisive impact on the development of the machine tool industry. And this is also conducive to the sustainable development of machine tool. Based on the analysis in this paper, we give suggestions for the development of the future machine tool industry.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper describes an approach for analysing trends in the research domain and presents a particular analysis in the field of machine tools. The approach is to use multiple sources of information, including scientific papers, patents, grants and news to acquire information about relevant topics. The extraction of the topics is based on machine learning methods. The analysis is applied to research in machine tools and conclusions are drawn from the results that are obtained.

The approach that is presented by the paper is valid and leads to reasonable results. English styles needs to be enhanced to improve readability, which is especially important for this kind of paper. A few examples are given below (item 6).

General remarks:
1) The main claim of the paper is to "explore future development of research". However, the paper does not really present future developments, but analyses only past activities. The paper (including its title) should thus be corrected to avoid claims that it would predict future developments.

2) The use of machine learning is appropriate, but one would expect a bit more caution when it is applied to the particular task. E.g. will the same set of topics be obtained if e.g. 25% of the papers are excluded from the analysis. This could be repeated 4 times, each time with different (randomly selected) papers being excluded (similar to "cross validation"). This will provide important information about the "stability" of the analysis.

3) Fig. 1 suggests that the results of the analysis of grants&papers, patents and news are merged at the end to obtain a joint analysis of the "future development". I believe the paper does not take this step, because a) the analysis is not merged and b) no predictions about the future are made. In order to fully justify the integrated approach that is claimed, a deeper joint analysis needs to be made, e.g. along the timeline. One would expect e.g. that topics first show up in grants, then in patents/papers and finally in the news. If such relationships could be shown, then this would enable predictions.

Minor remarks:
4) The text in figures 3,5,9 and 10 is barely readable. This should be changed.
5) When analyzing the data in section 4.1. it should be made clear what is directly supported by the facts (topics extracted) and what is interpretation by the authors based on their domain knowledge.
6) English style should be enhanced throughout the paper. I just list a few examples here: "It is noting ...", "literatures", "Given the fact that it is critical to identify and grasp the opportunity to develop machine tool, the future development of the machine tool field is an important question to be solved.", "..., there exists obvious limitation in these existing works.", "Many research have been employed ...".

Author Response

We have revised the manuscript according to the reviewer's opinion. And the response is submitted as a Word file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors

I can see that you have put some effort into revising your manuscript. However, the basic problem remains that your study is not directly about sustainability. For example, you do not consider the sustainability implications from extracting raw materials, transporting, processing them in the production of sensors etc. Then, you do not consider the sustainability implications of collecting, processing, transmitting and storing vast quantities of data. So, I cannot recommend this manuscript for publication in Sustainability.

Author Response

    Thanks very much for the valuable comment. According to the comment, we have further revised our earlier manuscript seriously to highlight the relatedness between this manuscript and Sustainability. Specifically, we have improved the methodological framework in Section 3.1 to add a discussion of the sustainability implications of machine tools. We modified the analytical framework of machine tool development in Figure 1. We aim to focus on the emerging developments in machine tool domain and to map out its future development trends in line with the characteristics of the machine tool industry. Based on these, we discussed the future sustainable development of machine tools. The overall logic of this paper after revision is as follows. First, we explore the emerging changes in the machine tool domain from multi-perspectives in Sections 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3. Second, we predict the future developments of machine tool through multi-view integration analysis in the discussion section.  Last, based on the emerging changes and the future developments of machine tools, we further discuss the sustainability development of machine tools. To this end, we have added section 5 to discuss the sustainability implications of the machine tool industry. In section 5, based on current emerging changes and new trends in machine tool, we explore the sustainability implications of the machine tool domain.

Firstly, the introduction of emerging machine tool technologies to transform the traditional technologies in the machine tool domain and the development of green machine tools that save energy, reduce consumption and reduce environmental pollution is one of the key ways for the sustainable development of the machine tool industry in the future. The reasons are as follows. The development of emerging technologies in the machine tool domain has laid the technical foundation for the maturity of green machine tools. The collection and analysis of machine tool big data is beneficial to record and optimize the process of the whole life cycle of the machine tool. The accumulation and mining of abundant machine tool big data can contribute optimizing the machine tool design and improving intergenerational evolution of the machine tool. This helps realize machine tool design that uses the least resource consumption and has the least environmental impact. In addition, the analysis of machine tool big data can realize real-time monitoring of machine tool processing status and predictive maintenance of equipment. Based on these, the machine tool can optimize the machining process to improve machining efficiency, reduce energy consumption and improve raw material utilization. The development of cloud computing technology and artificial intelligence in machine tool provides a method for analyzing big data of machine tools and enables the machine tool to have the ability of self-knowledge generation and adaptive control, which will greatly improve the performance of the machine tool. The machine tool IoT technology promotes the accumulation of machine tool big data and the collaborative control of the machine tool group. Combined with the CPS technology of machine tool, it further greatly improves the management ability and the processing efficiency of the machine tool group. Moreover, based on the IoT technology in machine tool, the free sharing and reuse of knowledge between machine tools can be realized, which greatly accelerates the continuous evolution of the machine tool industry. The integration of above emerging technologies has increased the level of intelligence of machine tools and promoted the development of machine tools towards green machine tools.

Secondly, the transformation of the traditional machine tool manufacturing mode by the cloud-based machine tool IoT ecosystem and the resulting transformation of machine tool enterprises into manufacturing services is another key way for the sustainable development of the machine tool industry. A large amount of raw materials are consumed in the machine tool manufacturing process, and saving raw materials is a factor that must be considered in the sustainable development of machine tools. Machine tool IoT ecosystem can greatly improve the management ability of machine tools both in time and space dimensions. Intelligent services based on the IoT ecosystem of the machine tool such as equipment fault prediction, real-time monitoring of machining status and remote maintenance can greatly improve the working efficiency of the machine tool and significantly reduce the risk of component failure, thus avoiding waste of raw materials due to failure. In addition, intelligent services based on the machine tool IoT ecosystem can improve the management of the raw material supply chain of machine tool components, reduce inventory and avoid waste of raw materials.

Thirdly, Machine tool remanufacturing technology is another way to achieve sustainable development in the machine tool industry. Comprehensive remanufacturing of old machine tools, effectively recovering and improving its performance and functions, and improving the control of its machining accuracy can greatly saves costs compared with the purchase of new machine tools of the same performance level. The key challenge of machine tool remanufacturing is the state prediction of core components in machine tool. Accurate prediction of the state of machine tool components is a prerequisite for component reuse, which can greatly reduce the cost of machine tool remanufacturing. The integration of big data technology and artificial intelligence technology makes it possible to predict the failure of machine components and predict the state, thus promoting the sustainable development of machine tool remanufacturing.

Finally, the machining process of machine tool requires a large amount of cutting fluid and coolant, which is a root source of environmental pollution. It can be seen from Table 6 in Section 4.1.4 that the study on the sustainable use of machine cutting fluid is the focus of current research in the field of machine tools. In the future, the recyclability technology of machine tool cutting fluids and coolants should be one of the key ways for the sustainable development of the machine tool industry.

In order to promote the sustainable development of machine tools in the future, we offer important suggestions for machine tool communities. For researchers, more attention can be paid on the combination of big data, artificial intelligence, CPS and machine tools domain. In addition, researchers in machine tool should focus on the recyclability technology of machine tool cutting fluids and coolants. For machine tool enterprises, they should pay attention to the improvement of the Internet of Things and cloud computing technology for enterprise business. Enterprises also should attach importance to the collection of machine tool big data, data-driven knowledge mining and the transformation towards manufacturing service-oriented organizations. For the machine tool industry, it is necessary to organize and implement a standard system including industrial information security, interconnection and communication. Finally, in view of the basic role of the machine tool industry in manufacturing, national policies should be developed at various national levels to encourage collaborative innovation in industry, academia and research in the international arena. Relevant laws and regulations should also be enacted to ensure the security of big data and the Internet of Things platform in the machine tool field.

The above contents directly discuss the future sustainable development of the machine tool domain under the new development stage. In fact, at the time of the fourth industrial revolution, the exploration for key areas development in manufacturing is also crucial to promoting the sustainable development of the future manufacturing industry [1]. As machine tool plays a unique and critical role in industry, machine tool technology is bound to become the essential part to the change of manufacturing in the condition of new-generation information technology and thus support the sustainable development of manufacturing further. As a support and Symbol of manufacturing paradigm change, exploring the development of machine tool is of great significance to identify and grasp the opportunity to promote the sustainable development of manufacturing.

Reference

1.       Yang, H. L.; Chang, T. W.; Choi, Y., Exploring the Research Trend of Smart Factory with Topic Modeling. Sustainability-Basel 2018, 10, (8).

Reviewer 3 Report

Several changes have been made to the paper and the experimental section has been extended to evaluate the stability of the results. I am satisfied with the changes that have been made.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments.