Dear Colleagues,

As the global market is growing quickly and changing rapidly, the manufacturing industry is facing pressure to have flexible product lines and to be connected with the supply chain until the market place. According to the United Nations, more than two-thirds of humankind will live in cities by 2050. This means the majority of the market will be organized inside urban areas. Locating factories in cities is the future demand of manfuacturing systems.

Urban factories promise economic city development. The urbanization of the manufacturing system can lead to improvements in direct employment. However, the environmental impact and space consumption are the challenges of placing factories inside a city. Smart factories to be achieved by Industry 4.0 have established micro-local factories close to markets to minimize the global production supply chain. To achieve this, the various aspects of productivity, zero-emission, energy saving, and human augmentation must be improved by digital transformation. The sustainability of urban factories is the key aspect to the success of urbaninzed factory system. These systems are characterized by:

• Economy: Urban smart factories improve productivity and flexbility as well as mass cutomization.
• Environment: Urban smart factories realize zero-emmisions, reduction of energy consumption, and advanced waste management.
• Society: Urban smart factories enhance the capability of human workers by using augmented technlogites, and improve resilience using remote work and robot platforms even though pandemic circumstances.

This Special Issue was organized to collect the research using cyber-physical systems for importing manufacturing systems to the center of urban environments. Topics of interest incude, but are not limited to:

• Zero-emmision factories;
• System design for vertical factory system;
• Internet of Things for energy estimation and optimization;
• Smart technology of factory control for pandemic management;
• Producvivity of human operators in smart factories;
• Virtual reality or augmented reality for remote work or robot control;
• Highly flexible modular factories;
• Emperical analysis of urbanization of factory systems;
• Building information modelling for urbanized factory systems; and
• Smart urban mobility.

Dr. Jumyung Um
Dr. Gökçen Yilmaz
Prof. Dr. Sang Do Noh
Dr. Yun-lee Jong
Dr. You-Suk Bae
Guest Editors

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• Industry 4.0
• Smart factory
• Sustainable manufacturing
• Internet of things
• Smart mobility