Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Platforms and Application—Second Edition

Dear Colleagues, 

Following the success of the previous Special Issue “Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Platforms and Applications”, we are pleased to announce the next in the series, entitled “Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Platforms and Application—Second Edition”. 

In the modern landscape of Industry 4.0, monolithic and vendor-specific industrial control systems (ICSs) of the past, which feature little or no interaction with the internet world, have been utilized to create a digitally interconnected and software-defined control ecosystem. In such highly distributed and heterogeneous environments, specialized modular software enables the centralized management and orchestration of the available services and infrastructures that control the manufacturing process. The latter provides a unified interoperable intelligent framework for the integration of operational technology (OT) with information technology (IT); this can ideally enable vendor-agnostic and policy-driven infrastructure control, as well as provide monitoring, decision, execution, and reporting services for large-scale workloads and product lifecycle management. The integration of OT with IT benefits industries by reducing costs and risks, and enhancing their performance and flexibility. A critical trend that boosts OT and IT convergence in the context of smart industries is the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). IIoT refers to the evolution of typical ICSs; as such, interconnected sensors, actuators, controllers, PLCs, instruments, and other field devices are networked together with industrial applications. Internetworking technologies comprise traditional serial protocols (e.g., RS232/485) and fieldbus topologies (e.g., Modbus, Profibus, and CAN) to packet data protocols (e.g., PROFINET and Industrial Ethernet), TCP/IP integration (e.g., VLANs, VPN, remote access, and QoS), and wireless connectivity (e.g., WLAN, 802.15.4, and LPWAN). This connectivity allows for a higher degree of automation via data collection, exchange, and analysis. Furthermore, the introduction of the IIoT into industrial environments has increased the intimacy between data processing and field devices, so that the response time is enhanced and the bandwidth reduced; this offers the opportunity to employ edge/fog computing in industrial applications. However, the emergence of this evolution comes with a price: novel risks and cyber-security threads abound at the different layers of ICSs, and industrial employers should become aware of these issues. 

Hence, IIoT is an umbrella term that incorporates advances in various technological fields such as wireless and computer networking, sensor networks, cyber-physical systems, cloud and edge computing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and cybersecurity. 

The aim of this Special Issue is to present high-quality, state-of-the-art research papers that address challenging issues regarding the Internet of Things for Industry-4.0-oriented applications. The scope of this Special Issue includes, but is not limited to, the following: 

• Advances in the Internet of Things for industrial applications;
• Sensor networking for Industry 4.0 applications;
• Advances concerning the various smart industries (smart factories, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, farming, cities, grids, etc.);
• Empirical studies from the deployment of IIoT applications in industrial environments;
• Advanced wireless networking for industrial use;
• Communication and networking issues for industrial environments;
• Network management issues for Industry 4.0 environments;
• Edge/fog/cloud computing for Industry 4.0;
• Network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) issues for industrial use;
• Cybersecurity issues and solutions for Industry 4.0 environments;
• Advances concerning the convergence of OT/IT in Industry 4.0 environments;
• Distributed ICSs for Industry 4.0;
• Human–machine interfaces (HMI) and SCADA supervisory systems for Industry 4.0;
• Augmented and virtual reality issues for Industry 4.0 applications;
• Machine learning, artificial, and computational intelligence for use in Industry 4.0 applications;
• Predictive diagnostics and maintenance tools for Industry 4.0;
• Advanced data repository and data analytics tools for Industry 4.0 applications;
• Supply chain management for Industry 4.0. 

Dr. Spyros Panagiotakis
Dr. Evangelos K. Markakis
Dr. Nancy Alonistioti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• industrial informatics
• Industry 4.0
• OT/IT convergence
• Internet of Things
• sensor networks
• computer networks
• wireless communications
• network management
• network function virtualization and software-defined networking
• cybersecurity
• predictive maintenance
• edge/fog/cloud computing
• smart industries (factories, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, farming, cities, grids, etc.)
• machine learning, artificial and computational intelligence
• augmented and virtual reality
• supply chain management
• data analytics
• human–computer interaction

• Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Platforms and Applications in Sensors (8 articles)