Each time a relevant proposal occurs, existing perspectives, concepts or fundamentals are confronted by emergent ones. The Industry 4.0 and its promoted production control systems based on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), made splash new potentials for the binomial human and technology (equipments and its settings). Several authors explore the envisaged required more physical and digital connection to announce interesting transformative changes, where self-configure and adaptive machines sustain the application of corrective decisions. This paper exposes a spectrum of existing CPS definitions and models and contributes with the fundamentals for an effective intelligent CPS (I-CPS), where a double loop learning process, allows its supporting software algorithms to be changed or reprogrammed. Instead, not only self-configure machines but its configuring software, too.

Globalisation and increased competition pushes companies to grow outside political and geographical boundaries, frequently forcing them to increase product diversification and optimise their relation with potential and effective partners and customers. In this scenario, implementing agile collaboration networks with business partners is a requirement. In this article the authors propose a collaborative framework based on a model for Historical, Present and Future evaluations, which in turn is based on a Dynamic Multi-criteria Decision Method using software agents and the Cloud for Collaborative Networked and Virtual Organization Synthesis. The model uses a dynamic decision approach for supplier and business partner evaluation, enabling software agents to autonomously capture business opportunities, select business partners/suppliers, award and process associated orders.

Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer in the world and the fifth-leading cause of cancer-related death. Treatment is effective in the early stages. Thus, a need to screen considerable portions of the population is crucial. When the screening procedure uncovers a suspect lesion, a biopsy is performed to assess its potential for malignancy. This procedure is usually performed using real-time Ultrasound (US) imaging. This work proposes a visualization system for US breast biopsy. It consists of an application running on AR glasses that interact with a computer application. The AR glasses track the position of QR codes mounted on an US probe and a biopsy needle. US images are shown in the user’s field of view with enhanced lesion visualization and needle trajectory. To validate the system, latency of the transmission of US images was evaluated. Usability assessment compared our proposed prototype with a traditional approach with different users. It showed that needle alignment was more precise, with 92.67 ± 2.32° in our prototype versus 89.99 ± 37.49° in a traditional system. The users also reached the lesion more accurately. Overall, the proposed solution presents promising results, and the use of AR glasses as a tracking and visualization device exhibited good performance.