Industrial Internet of Things in the Industry 4.0: New Researches, Applications and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

In the last few years a lot of effort is being put in the context of Industry 4.0 and in particular in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The application of the concepts of Internet of Things in an industrial environment opens a lot of different new application like Smart Factory, Smart Logistics, Smart Lifecycle, among others. The application of smart sensors, for instance, eases the digitalization process demanded by Industry 4.0 providing access to the information and configuration of field devices. Reference Architectures has been defined in this context, like Reference Architecture Model for Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) or Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA). In particular, the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) has been proposed in RAMI 4.0 to realize the concept of Digital Twin coming from Internet of Things to represent every asset, and its functionality, in the digital world. The digitalization process of Industry 4.0 and IIoT brings a lot of new scenarios and technologies that can be applied in the manufacturing process like Plug-and-Produce, Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Fog and Edge Computing, Interoperability and Integration protocols, and so on.

The main objective of this special issue is to collect state-of-the-art contributions on the latest research and development, up-to-date issues, and challenges in IIoT. We invite researchers from academia and industry to submit their high-quality works and research findings. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Emerging sensors in IIoT
• IIoT for industrial Condition Monitoring and Predictive Maintenance
• Intelligent robots based- IIoT for industrial applications
• Human machine interface in IIoT for industrial applications
• Smart manufacturing using IIoT
• Advances in reference architectures for Industry 4.0 and IIoT
• Plug-and-Produce, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Fog and Edge Computing in Industry 4.0
• Interoperability and Integration in IIoT and Industry 4.0
• New applications of IIoT in industry
• Machine-to-machine communication protocol (OneM2M, OPC UA, DDS, etc.)
• Novel Information models, standards mapping and software development techniques for IIoT
• Novel network technologies applied for IIoT (TSN, 5G, SDN etc.)
• Network management and industrial communication protocol
• Digital Twin, Device Models, Automation Models
• Novel applications of service-oriented architectures in IIoT (e.g., Microservices, REST, Serverless computing)
• Application of Blockchain Technology in the Manufacturing Industry
• Algorithms for remote IIoT data collection and filtering.

Prof. Dr. Salvatore Cavalieri

Prof. Dr. Nunzio Marco Torrisi
Guest Editor

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