# Collaborative Networks: A Pillar of Digital Transformation
## 5 Relevant Collaboration Aspects in Industry 4.0
### Collaboration in Acceleration of Manufacturing  
A major transformation factor is caused by several new technologies that are entering the industry and manufacturing arenas. Some of these technologies are characterized by a very fast increase in capabilities or performance, almost following an exponential growth law, and as such named \"exponential technologies\".  
This scenario/trend brings, as a side-effect, the need to accommodate new players, that look exogenous to the traditional manufacturing culture as they have different practices and different business cultures. Some of them lack the knowledge of established methods in manufacturing and thus the full potential of the introduction of such technologies can only be achieved when a proper combination of \"new\" and \"traditional\" methods can be pursued, which requires collaboration among very different stakeholders (Figure 8).  
Figure 8: Collaboration in the “acceleration” of manufacturing.  
Furthermore, additive manufacturing technologies allow for higher levels of distributed manufacturing, resorting to collaboration among entities from different geographical regions and bringing a \"localization flavor\". Fast development in mobile and secure communication technologies, including 5G and blockchain, allows nomadic collaboration in communities with multiple degrees of membership, as well as remote interaction between people and machines/systems. Rapid penetration of AI-based technologies leads to increased levels of autonomy of machines and systems, increasingly suggesting collaboration among machines (M2M) intelligent systems, and humans. This trend involves typical collaboration-related topics such as interoperability, sharing and communication, negotiation, contracting, and trust management, among others. New forms of interaction enabled by natural user interfaces, virtual reality, and augmented reality facilitate smoother collaboration between humans and systems/machines.  
What Can CNs Contribute?  
Although most early works in this dimension have mainly focused on the role of specific emerging technologies and their potential impact, some research already illustrates the potential of collaborative networks as an enabler for leveraging the potential of those technologies. Examples include:  
* Pursuing agility through a combination of mechanisms for dynamic consortia formation resulting from the areas of multi-agent systems [66] and CNs [47].
* Additive manufacturing/3D printing, which is often addressed only from a technological point of view, starts to be discussed as an interesting context for new collaboration models [95].
* Progress on mobile computing and connectivity concepts combined with virtual and augmented reality bring a new perspective to the way CNs are established by involving both virtual and real entities and considering nomadic collaboration [96; 97].
* Human-digital twins and social dimensions in human-machine collaboration [98]. Although this subject only recently started to be discussed in the CN community, a number of contributions can be found in related areas. This goes from the old concept of avatar to human digital twins used in manufacturing simulation [99]. Other examples can be found in [100], in which a digital twin emulates an employee's behaviour and participates in collaborative schedule planning, or in [101] in which human digital twins are used in collaboration between humans and multi smart machines. An interesting discussion of the social dimension of the human-machine interaction (with particular emphasis on robotics), including issues of cognitive and perceptual workload, attention, trust, communication protocols, distribution of roles, etc., can be found in [98].
* Collaboration between humans and intelligent machines [102] and some suggestions on \"biological transformation of manufacturing\" [103].