On the one side, Industrial competitiveness today means shorter product lifecycles, increased product variety, and shorter times to market and customized tangible products and services. To face these challenges, the manufacturing industry is forced to move from traditional management, control, and automation approaches towards industrial cyber-physical systems.
On the other side, several emergent engineering approaches and related Information-Communication-Control-Technologies, such as Multi-Agent-Systems, Service-Oriented Architecture, Plug-and-Produce Systems, Cloud and Fog Technologies, Big Data and Analytics, among others, have been researched during the last years. The confluence of those results with the latest developments in Industrial Digitalization, Systems-of-Cyber-Physical-Systems Engineering, Internet-of-Things, Internet-of-Services, and Industry 4.0 is opening a new broad spectrum of innovation possibilities.
The PERFoRM (Production-harmonizEd-Reconfiguration of Flexible Robots and Machinery) approach is one of them. It teaches the reader what it means when production machines and systems are digitalized and migrated into Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems and what happens when they are networked and start collaborating with each other and with the human, using the internet.
After a Technology Trend Screening and beyond a comprehensive state-of-the-art analysis about Industrial Digitalization and Industry 4.0-compliant solutions, the book introduces methods, architectures, and technologies applicable in real industrial use cases, explained for a broad audience of researchers, practitioners, and industrialists.