Guest Editorial Special Issue on Industrial Metaverse for Smart Manufacturing

The industry is undergoing a transformation toward smart manufacturing, fostering intelligent operations, sustainability, and digitalization. However, the current state of the process industry falls short of this future vision. Key areas, such as hybrid modeling, autonomous control, dynamic scheduling, intelligent decision making, security and safety control, and predictive maintenance, still require significant development. Given that the industrial metaverse enables the virtualization and digitization of industrial processes using technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and digital twins, it is promising to establish the industrial metaverse for manufacturing, encompassing the entire lifecycle based on the industrial Internet and other modern information technologies.