Guest Editorial: Networks for Cyber-Physical Systems and Industry 4.0

The current industrial revolution, which is driven by ICT, will change the world in the next decade and beyond. All sectors of Industry and Society will be impacted. Computerization and connectivity are permeating all sectors. The digitalization of industries, enabled by IoT technologies; the monitoring and control of all tools of production, collecting data from thousands of sensors, to create a digital twin of the product being realized or the operation being achieved. All of that, to increase productivity of manufacturing, logistics and many other industrial contexts. Machine intelligence will make it possible to detect and understand what is happening in an industrial plant, predict what could happen, and eventually react to prevent problems or faults or providing the human supervisor all the means to take the best decision. Telecom networks are essential to enable that revolution, which is commonly referred to as Industry 4.0. In fact, to realize all the above, wireless connectivity, cloud and machine intelligence will integrate more and more with physical systems and processes to achieve cyber-physical systems (CPSs). CPSs are based on the integration of computation, networking and physical processes. They combine several systems of different natures with the main purpose of controlling a physical process. Through feedback mechanisms, they adapt themselves to new conditions in real time. CPSs will be present in most industry sectors, and will follow the Industry 4.0 paradigm. Production environments will be self-configuring, self-adjusting, and self-optimizing, leading to greater agility.