Special Issue on next-generation Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0

The Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0 enable interconnections among industrial machines, devices, processes, and the people using them. These connections take place across diverse industry verticals, including manufacturing and its logistical supply chain, transportation, and maintenance. While the Industrial Internet requires the joint design and optimisation of communications, caching, computing, and control, most existing research on the topic focuses on only one aspect. There exists complexity in the storage, processing, and inferencing of the colossal volume of data generated by the real-world industry verticals anywhere and anytime. The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based techniques can extract meaningful knowledge and information from these data. Despite the advantages of AI, its appropriate deployments pose several challenges with respect to data quality, data volume, data integration and accuracy of the inferences drawn from collected industrial data.

Despite the theoretical advancements made over the past few years, research on the Industrial Internet is still at an early stage, with many technical conundrums to be answered before we unlock its full potentials for reliable and large-scale implementations. This special issue focuses on addressing the major challenges for the next-generation Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0.

Topics covered:

These include, but are not limited to:

• Fundamental trade-offs between communications, caching, computing, and control
• Computational intelligence techniques for real-time Industrial Internet systems
• Federated/distributed learning frameworks for Industrial Internet applications at edge/fog networks
• AI-based trustworthy services for Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0
• AI-based platforms for industrial safety using Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0
• Advanced AI models for industry applications for Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0
• Collaborative computational intelligence techniques for Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0
• Wireless network protocol designs for supporting multi-loop control systems and Industry 4.0
• Ultra-reliable and low latency communication protocols for Industrial Internet and Industry 4.0

Important dates:

• Submission deadline: 15 December 2022
• First revision due: 15 January 2023
• Second revision due: 15 March 2023
• Final manuscript due: 15 June 2023
• Publication date: December 2023

Submission instructions:

Please read the Guide for Authors before submitting. Manuscripts submitted to this special issue should not be concurrently submitted for publication in other channels. All articles should be submitted online; please select “Industrial Internet” as the article type.

Guest Editors:

• Honggang Wang, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA. Email: hwang1@umassd.edu
• Enzo Mingozzi, University of Pisa, Italy. Email: mingozzi@unipi.it
• Tarik Taleb, University of Oulu, Finland. Email: taleb@oulu.fi
• Dapeng Wu, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China. Email: wudp@cqupt.edu.cn