Dear Colleagues,

We are inviting submissions to the Special Issue on Industry 4.0, Digitization and Opportunities for Sustainability.

The technology “across” processes of Industry 4.0 is now in need of flexibility for production, and a robustness of value chains in order to get circularity and sustainability into technology. It adopts the Human in the Loop approach while applying “smart” technologies to physically and digitally adapt production processes to the societal, environmental, and industrial landscape. Those are mainly oriented to efficiently managing mass manufacturing resources, and capabilities across virtualization aims at virtualizing and cloud sharing.

In the new industrial paradigm, interconnected computers, smart materials, and intelligent machines communicate with one another, interact with the environment, and eventually make centralised decisions with minimal human involvement.

Digitizing manufacturing and business processes and deploying smarter machines and devices may offer numerous advantages in manufacturing productivity, resource efficiency, and waste reduction.

The rising deployment of sensors and IoT devices gives rise to the explosive generation of big data's vast and diverse volume. Those require advanced big data analytics strategies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technologies to construct automated robotics systems (large scale and proactive and service-oriented) oriented to reliability and efficiency.

In contrast, the increased production capacity (with its low cost  “power”) thanks to industrial automation would be associated with preferable “new” product  adoption (avoid repairing) with  higher resource and energy consumption and elevated pollution concerns. Moreover, from the social development perspective, digital transformation, and the industry's restructuring are expected to severely disrupt the traditional labor market. Experts believe digitization and the emergence of labor-saving technologies (e.g., IoT, autonomous vehicles and cloud solutions) will eliminate most lower-skilled jobs while creating countless job opportunities in various areas, such as automation engineering, control system design, machine learning, and software engineering.

In this Special Issue, we invite submissions exploring cutting-edge research and recent advances in the Industry (from 4.0 to 5.0)  revolution regarding the sustainability and circularity implications in terms of economic, environmental, and social impacts of manufacturing digitization. Both theoretical and experimental studies are welcome and comprehensive review and survey papers.

The objective of this proposed section is to collect contributions to share knowledge on: a business model to support integration, identification, application, and mapping of Industry 4.0 technologies to support sustainability and circularity; cloud manufacturing strategies integrating robotics and advanced network to sustain process efficiency; model, design, control, and simulation of processes to support smart and sustainable environments;  Big data analytics and machine learning techniques to sustain energy efficiency in industrials; and human and robot cooperating for fitting sustainability and circularity.

Thank you very much and we look forward to receiving submission of your quality research work.

Dr. Fabio Fruggiero
Dr. Marta Chinnici
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• smart manufacturing
• smart cities
• digitization
• sustainability innovation
• energy efficiency
• circularity
• cloud technologies
• blockchain
• ICT infrastructure
• data analytics