Manufacturing industry profoundly impact economic and societal progress. As being a commonly accepted term for research centers and universities, the Industry 4.0 initiative has received a splendid attention of the business and research community. Although the idea is not new and was on the agenda of academic research in many years with different perceptions, the term “Industry 4.0” is just launched and well accepted to some extend not only in academic life but also in the industrial society as well. While academic research focuses on understanding and defining the concept and trying to develop related systems, business models and respective methodologies, industry, on the other hand, focuses its attention on the change of industrial machine suits and intelligent products as well as potential customers on this progress. It is therefore important for the companies to primarily understand the features and content of the Industry 4.0 for potential transformation from machine dominant manufacturing to digital manufacturing. In order to achieve a successful transformation, they should clearly review their positions and respective potentials against basic requirements set forward for Industry 4.0 standard. This will allow them to generate a well-defined road map. There has been several approaches and discussions going on along this line, a several road maps are already proposed. Some of those are reviewed in this paper. However, the literature clearly indicates the lack of respective assessment methodologies. Since the implementation and applications of related theorems and definitions outlined for the 4th industrial revolution is not mature enough for most of the reel life implementations, a systematic approach for making respective assessments and evaluations seems to be urgently required for those who are intending to speed this transformation up. It is now main responsibility of the research community to developed technological infrastructure with physical systems, management models, business models as well as some well-defined Industry 4.0 scenarios in order to make the life for the practitioners easy. It is estimated by the experts that the Industry 4.0 and related progress along this line will have an enormous effect on social life. As outlined in the introduction, some social transformation is also expected. It is assumed that the robots will be more dominant in manufacturing, implanted technologies, cooperating and coordinating machines, self-decision-making systems, autonom problem solvers, learning machines, 3D printing etc. will dominate the production process. Wearable internet, big data analysis, sensor based life, smart city implementations or similar applications will be the main concern of the community. This social transformation will naturally trigger the manufacturing society to improve their manufacturing suits to cope with the customer requirements and sustain competitive advantage. A summary of the potential progress along this line is reviewed in introduction of the paper. It is so obvious that the future manufacturing systems will have a different vision composed of products, intelligence, communications and information network. This will bring about new business models to be dominant in industrial life. Another important issue to take into account is that the time span of this so-called revolution will be so short triggering a continues transformation process to yield some new industrial areas to emerge. This clearly puts a big pressure on manufacturers to learn, understand, design and implement the transformation process. Since the main motivation for finding the best way to follow this transformation, a comprehensive literature review will generate a remarkable support. This paper presents such a review for highlighting the progress and aims to help improve the awareness on the best experiences. It is intended to provide a clear idea for those wishing to generate a road map for digitizing the respective manufacturing suits. By presenting this review it is also intended to provide a hands-on library of Industry 4.0 to both academics as well as industrial practitioners. The top 100 headings, abstracts and key words (i.e. a total of 619 publications of any kind) for each search term were independently analyzed in order to ensure the reliability of the review process. Note that, this exhaustive literature review provides a concrete definition of Industry 4.0 and defines its six design principles such as interoperability, virtualization, local, real-time talent, service orientation and modularity. It seems that these principles have taken the attention of the scientists to carry out more variety of research on the subject and to develop implementable and appropriate scenarios. A comprehensive taxonomy of Industry 4.0 can also be developed through analyzing the results of this review.

Literature review of Industry 4.0 and related technologies

Internet of Things (IoT), which will create a huge network of billions or trillions of “Things” communicating with one another, are facing many technical and application challenges. This paper introduces the status of IoT development in China, including policies, R&D plans, applications, and standardization. With China's perspective, this paper depicts such challenges on technologies, applications, and standardization, and also proposes an open and general IoT architecture consisting of three platforms to meet the architecture challenge. Finally, this paper discusses the opportunity and prospect of IoT.

A Vision of IoT: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities With China Perspective

The dissemination of patients’ medical records results in diverse risks to patients’ privacy as malicious activities on these records cause severe damage to the reputation, finances, and so on of all parties related directly or indirectly to the data. Current methods to effectively manage and protect medical records have been proved to be insufficient. In this paper, we propose MeDShare, a system that addresses the issue of medical data sharing among medical big data custodians in a trust-less environment. The system is blockchain-based and provides data provenance, auditing, and control for shared medical data in cloud repositories among big data entities. MeDShare monitors entities that access data for malicious use from a data custodian system. In MeDShare, data transitions and sharing from one entity to the other, along with all actions performed on the MeDShare system, are recorded in a tamper-proof manner. The design employs smart contracts and an access control mechanism to effectively track the behavior of the data and revoke access to offending entities on detection of violation of permissions on data. The performance of MeDShare is comparable to current cutting edge solutions to data sharing among cloud service providers. By implementing MeDShare, cloud service providers and other data guardians will be able to achieve data provenance and auditing while sharing medical data with entities such as research and medical institutions with minimal risk to data privacy.

MeDShare: Trust-Less Medical Data Sharing Among Cloud Service Providers via Blockchain

Since wireless network virtualization enables abstraction and sharing of infrastructure and radio spectrum resources, the overall expenses of wireless network deployment and operation can be reduced significantly. Moreover, wireless network virtualization can provide easier migration to newer products or technologies by isolating part of the network. Despite the potential vision of wireless network virtualization, several significant research challenges remain to be addressed before widespread deployment of wireless network virtualization, including isolation, control signaling, resource discovery and allocation, mobility management, network management and operation, and security as well as non-technical issues such as governance regulations, etc. In this paper, we provide a brief survey on some of the works that have already been done to achieve wireless network virtualization, and discuss some research issues and challenges. We identify several important aspects of wireless network virtualization: overview, motivations, framework, performance metrics, enabling technologies, and challenges. Finally, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing wireless network virtualization.

Wireless Network Virtualization: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges

http://www.parkjonghyuk.net/lecture/2015-1st-lecture/networksecurity/Paper2.pdf

Security in cloud computing

We consider the problem of allocation of resources within a buffered crossbar switch with credit-based flow control to support quality of service for traffic flows in the Internet. Specifically, we assume there is a collection of classes of service, each characterized by a strict delay upper bound that applies across all packets of the class. Flows entering the switch are characterized by arrival curves, and the switch must achieve delay objectives subject to the arrival curves. We develop a technique for determining the amount of bandwidth and the number of credits that must be allocated to a flow in order to guarantee its delay requirements. This technique also provides the basis for analyzing the maximum traffic handling capacity of a switch. We provide numerical examples that illustrate the application of our techniques. Finally, we discuss the performance of buffered crossbar switches having finite buffers with respect to that of output buffered switches under the same class of scheduling regimes.

Resource allocation for quality of service provision in buffered crossbar switches

Modeling and Algorithms for QoS-Aware Service Composition in Virtualization-Based Cloud Computing

Resource allocation for quality of service provision in multistage buffered crossbar switches

Cloud-native network design, which leverages network virtualization and softwarization together with the service-oriented architectural principle, is transforming communication networks to a versatile platform for converged network-cloud/edge service provisioning. Intelligent and autonomous management is one of the most challenging issues in cloud-native future networks, and a wide range of machine learning (ML)-based technologies have been proposed for addressing different aspects of the management challenge. It becomes critical that the various management technologies are applied on the foundation of a consistent architectural framework with a holistic vision. This calls for standardization of new management architecture that supports seamless the integration of diverse ML-based technologies in cloud-native future networks. The goal of this paper is to provide a big picture of the recent developments of architectural frameworks for intelligent and autonomous management for future networks. The paper surveys the latest progress in the standardization of network management architectures including works by 3GPP, ETSI, and ITU-Tand analyzes how cloud-native network design may facilitate the architecture development for addressing management challenges. Open issues related to intelligent and autonomous management in cloud-native future networks are also discussed in this paper to identify some possible directions for future research and development.

https://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/13/2/42/pdf

Intelligent and autonomous management in cloud-native future networks — A survey on related standards from an architectural perspective

Cloud computing is one of the most significant latest efforts in the field of information technology, which may change the way how information services are provisioned. In a Cloud environment, different types of resources need to be virtualized as a collection of Cloud services using virtualization technology. End-users in the Cloud are usually provided with customized Cloud services that involve not only different kinds of computing services but also the networks interconnecting those computing services. Therefore, a set of Cloud computing services and the networking services should be modeled as a composite customized Cloud service. In this paper, we present an improved model for Cloud service provisioning based on our previous Network-Cloud proposal, and propose a procedure with several QoS-aware service selection algorithms for composing different services offered by a Cloud. Our analysis with numerical experiments show that the presented algorithms can select services appropriately that deal with different requirements of service provisioning.

Qiang Duan

Papers

Resource allocation for quality of service provision in buffered crossbar switches

Modeling and Algorithms for QoS-Aware Service Composition in Virtualization-Based Cloud Computing

Resource allocation for quality of service provision in multistage buffered crossbar switches

Intelligent and autonomous management in cloud-native future networks — A survey on related standards from an architectural perspective

QoS-aware service selection in virtualization-based Cloud computing