The Industry 4.0 paradigm, since its initial conception in Germany in 2011, has extended its scope and adoption to a broader set of technologies. It is being considered as the most vital mechanism in the production systems lifecycle. It is the key element in the digital transformation of manufacturing industry all over the world. This scenario imposes a set of major unprecedented challenges which require to be overcome. In order to enable integration in horizontal, vertical, and end-to-end formats, one of the most critical aspects of this digital transformation process consists of effectively coupling digital integrated service/products business models with additive manufacturing processes. This integration is based upon advanced AI-based tools for decentralized decision-making and for secure and trusted data sharing in the global value. This paper presents the FASTEN IIoT Platform, which targets to provide a flexible, configurable, and open solution. The platform acts as an interface between the shop floor and the industry 4.0 advanced applications and solutions. Examples of these efforts comprise management, forecasting, optimization, and simulation, by harmonizing the heterogeneous characteristics of the data sources involved while meeting real-time requirements.

We present a comprehensive survey on parallel I/O in the high-performance computing (HPC) context. This is an important field for HPC because of the historic gap between processing power and storage latency, which causes application performance to be impaired when accessing or generating large amounts of data. As the available processing power and amount of data increase, I/O remains a central issue for the scientific community. In this survey article, we focus on a traditional I/O stack, with a POSIX parallel file system. We present background concepts everyone could benefit from. Moreover, through the comprehensive study of publications from the most important conferences and journals in a 5-year time window, we discuss the state of the art in I/O optimization approaches, access pattern extraction techniques, and performance modeling, in addition to general aspects of parallel I/O research. With this approach, we aim at identifying the general characteristics of the field and the main current and future research topics.

In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on time-sensitive applications implemented in fog computing environments. The goal is to research what applications are being implemented in fog computing architectures and how the temporal requirements of these applications are being addressed. We also carried out a comprehensive analysis of the articles surveyed and separate them into categories, according to a pattern found in them. Our research is important for the area of real-time systems since the concept of systems that respond in real time has presented various understandings and concepts. This variability of concept has been due to the growing requirements for fast data communication and processing. Therefore, we present different concepts of real-time and near real-time systems found in the literature and currently accepted by the academic-scientific community. Finally, we conduct an analytical discussion of the characteristics and proposal of articles.