Industry 4.0 and big data innovations

With the aims of achieving the distributed, collaborative and automated design & manufacturing workflow, the concept of Industry 4.0 and its associated implementations have been effectively taken advantages of those developed technologies such as CyberPhysical System, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics. More specifically, the fundamental infrastructures, the cyber-physical system and internet of things enable the collecting and transferring of industrial data through a fusion of peripherals such as software, sensors, and electronics. On computation infrastructure level, the cloud computing techniques help the centralized data storage, while offering the platform for collaboration to expedite and refine resource allocation and research for entire industry gains. As the exponential amounts of industrial data gleaned from the above phases, the big data analytics has also been exploited to organize these digital assets and extract valuable insights from it. Those motivations have attracted significant the attention from both of industrial and academia. While some special issues of well-established journals have been focused on the related topics, in this special issue, we aim to investigate the manifold relationship between Industry 4.0 and Big Data, which has not been well focused yet. By bringing together the active researchers from the related fields, we have solicited five papers for publication after a rigorous peer-review process. From different aspects in the scenario of smart manufacturing, these works proposed the surveys, the mechanisms and frameworks spanning from the infrastructural level, to the data processing level, as well as the service level of Industry 4.0. Here, we provide an integrative perspective of this special issue, by summarizing each contribution contained therein. With the technology development in cyber-physical systems and big data, there is huge potential to apply them for resource efficiency in Industry 4.0. However, only several existing surveys have been done on cyber-physical systems or big data in Industry 4.0, and few of them is related to their intersection. In fact, cyber-physical systems are closely associated with big data in nature. xuBigDataCyber2018 conducted a survey to bring attentions to this critical intersection and highlight the future research direction to achieve full autonomy in Industry 4.0 (Xu and Duan This issue). When being considered as a system with several independent decision makers, there is a need of a supply chain network equilibrium model on manufacturers, retailers and consumers. In the work by Lan et al., after analyzing the optimal conditions of various decision makers in the model, the equilibrium condition is established, and is then solved by a smoothing Newton method . The global and quadratic convergence of the method is proved, and the numerical results indicate the rapid convergence of the method. Such a model would be sufficiently general for different types of decision makers and their independent behaviors in the real world (Lan et al. 2018). ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS 2019, VOL. 13, NO. 2, 145–147 https://doi.org/10.1080/17517575.2018. 1554190