Abstract
Technological innovation in product design and engineering manufacture is nowadays progressing faster than ever before due to globalization, integration of knowledge from different sources and domains and breakthroughs in Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
The growing impact of ICT and digital technologies on manufacturing industry is leading to a substantial paradigm shift, fostering the development of new methods and tools that support the adoption of new production and product development technologies. With the convergence of the physical world and the digital world, the future of design and manufacturing is geared towards producing customer-specific products ensuring short product life cycles, quick delivery times, zero-defect production and resource-efficient manufacturing while strengthening the human role in advanced production. Known by different terms, for example, ‘Advanced Manufacturing’, ‘Digital Factory’, ‘Intelligent Manufacturing’ and ‘Industry 4.0’, it envisions the manufacturing renaissance. This new vision of what industrial and manufacturing production will look like in the future has been defined as a top strategic priority for technological innovation and the future of manufacturing by many nations around the world. This is a clear future direction for manufacturing research that is closely associated with next-generation manufacturing automation and autonomy. The Journal of Engineering Manufacture will actively lead the global drive for high-quality research development and dissemination in these topics.
With ‘smart manufacturing and digital factory’, the convergence of the physical world and the digital world is enabled and data-driven, resource-efficient, human-centred, green and sustainable manufacturing can be achieved. Better and optimal products will be manufactured, faster time-to-market will be enabled and competitiveness and innovation ability of industrial companies will be enhanced.
This special issue aims to highlight contributions dealing with ‘smart manufacturing and digital factory’ allowing to disseminate research findings and recent practices. The selected papers included in this special issue cover a wide range of scientific topics and technological subjects. The paper of Mittal et al. discusses the synthesis and review of the research literature to set up characteristics, technologies and enabling factors of smart manufacturing. Based on the recent developments of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, fog computing and service-oriented technologies, among others, Song and Moon propose an overview of the key concepts for the implementation of cyber-manufacturing systems including the associated architecture and functions as well as the evaluation of performance that shows their superiority over other types of manufacturing systems. The paper of Durupt et al. considers an added-value contribution for an extended framework based on product knowledge modelling to support a reverse engineering approach in order to integrate the parts quickly into the new product’s detailed design. Menon et al. propose an analysis and evaluation of industrial internet platforms capabilities to address information and knowledge in the context of product lifecycle management. In their paper, Bordron et al. consider an inline measurement solution based on a robot combined with a laser sensor and a dedicated algorithm to generate path planning for digitizing additive manufacturing parts at a given quality of the resulting cloud of points. Finally, the paper of Zhao et al. focuses on a feature-based method to support tool path generation in five-axis robotized additive manufacturing using fused deposition modelling (FDM).
It is our hope and expectation that the contents of this special issue will help researchers and practitioners to advance ‘smart manufacturing and digital factory’ knowledge and applications. We would like to take the opportunity to thank all the reviewers for their efforts and constructive comments. We would, in particular, like to thank the editorial team of Proc IMechE Part B: J Engineering Manufacture, for their great support and constructive useful suggestions. Last, we would also like to thank all authors who contributed to this special issue, for submitting their manuscripts and sharing their latest research results.