Decision-making for manufacturing and maintenance operations is benefiting from the advanced sensor infrastructure of Industry 4.0, enabling the use of algorithms that analyze data, predict emerging situations, and recommend mitigating actions. The current paper reviews the literature on data-driven decision-making in maintenance and outlines directions for future research towards data-driven decision-making for Industry 4.0 maintenance applications. The main research directions include the coupling of decision-making with augmented reality for seamless interfacing that combines the real and virtual worlds of manufacturing operators; methods and techniques for addressing uncertainty of data, in lieu of emerging Internet of Things (IoT) devices; integration of maintenance decision-making with other operations such as scheduling and planning; utilization of the cloud continuum for optimal deployment of decision-making services; capability of decision-making methods to cope with big data; incorporation of advanced security mechanisms; and coupling decision-making with simulation software, autonomous robots, and other additive manufacturing initiatives.

The emergence of Industry 4.0 enhances the capabilities of predictive maintenance and paves the way for efficient and optimized maintenance operations. Until now, the technical implications of adopting predictive maintenance solutions in Industry 4.0 environments have been reported in various studies. However, the business perspective is usually not considered, although there are significant managerial barriers towards the 4th industrial revolution. In this paper, we present the benefits, business opportunities and managerial implications of predictive maintenance based upon our experience in the design, implementation and deployment of related solutions.

The quality level in manufacturing processes increasingly concerns manufacturing firms, as they respond to pressures such as increasing complexity and variety of products, more complex value chains and shortened time-to-market. Quality management is becoming increasingly challenging as model variety, and highly complex products harbour the danger of distributing defective products in the market. Data analytics has started gathering the interest of quality researchers and practitioners, who investigate approaches, algorithms, and methods for supporting the manufacturing quality procedures in the context of Industry 4.0. This trend is facilitated by the wide expansion of sensory technology and the accelerated adoption of information systems by the manufacturing firms. Since quality and process control has been identified as one of the major challenges with a high potential of big data analytics, in this paper we investigated the manufacturing quality research field from a data analytics perspective. Specifically, we examined the existing literature, we provided clarity to the Quality 4.0 research field, we synthesized the literature review outcomes, and we identified the research gaps and challenges. On top of them, we proposed directions for future research.

Traditional manufacturing businesses lack the standards, skills, processes, and technologies to meet today's challenges of Industry 4.0 driven by an interconnected world. Enterprise Integration and Interoperability can ensure efficient communication among various services driven by big data. However, the data management challenges affect not only the technical implementation of software solutions but the function of the whole organization. In this paper, we bring together Enterprise Integration and Interoperability, Big Data Processing, and Industry 4.0 in order to identify synergies that have the potential to enable the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” On this basis, we propose an architectural framework for designing and modeling Industry 4.0 solutions for big data-driven manufacturing operations. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework through its instantiation to predictive maintenance, a manufacturing function that increasingly concerns manufacturers due to the high costs, safety issues, and complexity of its application.