AI and IoT Convergence for Sustainable Smart Manufacturing

Dear Colleagues,

As customers increasingly pay attention to sustainability, the global high-tech and manufacturing industries are required to develop green growth strategies to achieve net-zero emissions from various perspectives. To ensure long-term competitiveness, smart factories must manufacture products that meet the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. Government regulations on energy saving, carbon reduction, carbon trading, carbon neutrality, and carbon tax are also becoming increasingly stringent. Noncompliant products will be subject to additional charges, and companies will need to trade carbon credits with other companies to satisfy the standards. These requirements increase the production cost, and further affect the company’s competitiveness in the global supply chain. Therefore, considering net-zero carbon emissions in smart manufacturing (a.k.a, sustainable smart manufacturing) will play a key role in global competitiveness.

In sustainable smart manufacturing, it is required to meet the ESG standards to minimize resource and energy consumption and reduce or eliminate carbon emissions in the manufacturing process to reach net-zero carbon emissions. The operations of sustainable smart manufacturing are highly reliant on sustainable and mutually supportive systems assisted by the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), smart manufacturing devices, systems and services such as sensors and actuators, and other smart technologies. In sustainable smart factories, the cloud center continuously collects real-time information on production, energy consumption, pollution, and emissions from manufacturing sites through sensors and the IoT, then adopts AI and deep learning algorithms to identify objects and sense the environment, and finally, implements smart physical operations through actuators, which enable them to react in real time to carbon emissions, anomalies, emergencies, and so on. Furthermore, additional functions, such as prediction and simulation, are derived to create ESG-compliant products, zero-carbon production lines, sustainable smart factories, and other valuable applications.

Therefore, this Special Issue encourages new thinking and discussion on how AI and IoT technologies can address the many key issues of energy management, optimization, and the performance of sensors and actuators in sustainable smart manufacturing.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• AI and IoT applications for sustainable smart manufacturing;
• AI and IoT technologies for the energy management of sensors and actuators;
• AI and IoT technologies for energy storage systems of sensors and actuators;
• AI and IoT technologies for wireless energy harvesting;
• AI and IoT technologies for the deployment and scheduling of sensors and actuators;
• AI and IoT technologies for obtaining ESG data and analysis;
• Design of sensors and actuators in sustainable smart manufacturing;
• Industry 4.0 for sustainable smart manufacturing;
• Energy distribution of sensors and actuators;
• Green energy and carbon footprint of sensors and actuators;
• Sustainability and net-zero carbon emissions in smart manufacturing processes;
• ESG applications in smart manufacturing;
• Novel applications of sensors and actuators in sustainable smart manufacturing.

Prof. Dr. Chun-Cheng Lin
Dr. Tony Huang
Guest Editors

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• sustainable smart manufacturing
• environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards
• industry 4.0
• artificial intelligence (AI)
• internet of things (IoT)
• sensors and actuators
• energy distribution and management
• mathemtical and computational modelling
• machine/deep learning
• deployment and scheduling
• wireless energy harvesting