Internet of Things for Industrial Applications

Dear Colleagues,

In the modern landscape of Industry 4.0, the monolithic and vendor-specific industrial control systems (ICS) of the past, with little or any interaction with the Internet world, are pushed to create a digitally interconnected and software-defined control ecosystem. In such highly distributed and heterogeneous environments, specialized modular software enables centralized management and orchestration of available services and infrastructures controlling the manufacturing process. The latter provides a unified interoperable intelligent framework for the integration of the operational technology (OT) with the information technology (IT) that can ideally enable vendor-agnostic and policy-driven infrastructure control, as well as monitoring, decision, execution, and reporting services for large-scale workloads and product lifecycle management. The integration of OT with IT benefits industries by reducing cost and risks along with higher performance and gains in flexibility. A critical trend that has boosted OT and IT convergence in the context of Smart Industries is the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). IIoT refers to the evolution of typical ICS, so interconnected sensors, actuators, controllers, PLCs, instruments, and other field devices are networked together with industrial applications. The internetworking technologies comprise from traditional serial protocols (e.g., RS232/485) and fieldbus topologies (e.g., Modbus, Profibus, CAN) to packet data protocols (e.g., Profinet, Industrial Ethernet), TCP/IP integration (e.g., VLANs, VPN, remote access, QoS) and wireless connectivity (e.g., WLAN, 802.15.4, LPWAN). This connectivity allows for a higher degree of automation via data collection, exchange, and analysis. Furthermore, the introduction of IoT into industrial environments has brought the need for data processing closer to the field devices to improve response times and save bandwidth, thus opening the path to Edge/Fog computing in industrial applications. However, the emergence of this evolution comes with a price: New risks and cyber-security threads abound at the different layers of ICS which industrial employers should become aware of. Hence, IIoT is an umbrella term that incorporates advances from various technological fields such as wireless and computer networking, sensor networks, cyber-physical systems, cloud and edge computing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and cybersecurity. 

The goal of this Special Issue is to invite high-quality, state-of-the-art research papers that deal with challenging issues in the Internet of Things for Industrial 4.0-oriented Applications. We solicit original papers of unpublished and completed research that are not currently under review by any other conference/magazine/journal. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• Advances in Internet of Things for industrial applications;
• Sensor networking for industrial 4.0 applications;
• Advances concerning the various smart industries (smart factories, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, farming, cities, grids, etc.);
• Empirical studies from the deployment of IIoT applications in industrial environments;
• Advanced wireless networking for industrial use;
• Communication and networking issues for industrial environments;
• Network management issues for Industrial 4.0 environments;
• Edge/Fog/cloud computing for Industry 4.0;
• Network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) issues for industrial use;
• Cybersecurity issues and solutions for industrial 4.0 environments;
• Advances concerning the convergence of OT/IT in industrial 4.0 environments;
• Distributed ICS for Industry 4.0;
• Human–machine interfaces (HMI) and SCADA supervisory systems for Industry 4.0;
• Augmented and virtual reality issues for industrial 4.0 applications;
• Machine learning, artificial and computational intelligence for use in industrial 4.0 applications;
• Predictive diagnostics and maintenance tools for Industry 4.0;
• Advanced data repository and data analytics tools for industrial 4.0 applications;
• Supply chain management for Industry 4.0.

Prof. Dr. Nancy Alonistioti
Prof. Dr. Spyros Panagiotakis
Dr. Evangelos K. Markakis
Guest Editors

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