Dear Colleagues,

Modern manufacturing industry practices have invested heavily in data transport from the factory floor to the cloud, where bulk process and monitoring data are analyzed in depth, leveraging the computing superiority and resource flexibility of a remote cloud infrastructure. Additionally, cloud processing renders difficult a trustworthy exchange of information between different industrial data providers in a certified manner. Moreover, considering the heterogeneity of data sources and the requirements of the offered services found in Industry 4.0/5.0 scenarios, different processing techniques must be considered. Data sharing already plays a crucial role in the manufacturing industry; either through data sharing for defect detection or through entire production chain provision and analysis, a significant amount of data are generated each second on the factory floor. The existing horizontal approach cannot encapsulate the interrelations between the different domain processes, actors and equipment in the OT environment, and each domain analysis remains isolated and monolithic. The goal of this Special Issue is to invite high-quality, state-of-the-art research papers that deal with challenging issues in the “Edge Computing, Big Data and Digital Twin towards Smart Manufacturing and Industry 5.0” applications and domain.

Papers should focus on:

• 5G NPN integration in the plant floor;
• Data sharing across different shop floors;
• GAIA-X and IDSA integration;
• Cybersecurity aspects in the I4.0 or I5.0 domain;
• OPC-UA;
• Horizontal paradigm in I4.0 or I5.0;
• Digital twin paradigm;
• Orbital edge in I4.0 or I5.0;
• Edge processing;
• Edge computing;
• Edge security.

Dr. Evangelos Markakis
Dr. Michael Alexandros Kourtis
Guest Editors

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