Rapid advances in industrialisation and informatisation methods have spurred tremendous progress in developing the next generation of manufacturing technology. Today, we are on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In 2013, amongst one of 10 ‘Future Projects’ identified by the German government as part of its High-Tech Strategy 2020 Action Plan, the Industry 4.0 project is considered to be a major endeavour for Germany to establish itself as a leader of integrated industry. In 2014, China’s State Council unveiled their ten-year national plan, Made-in-China 2025, which was designed to transform China from the world’s workshop into a world manufacturing power. Made-in-China 2025 is an initiative to comprehensively upgrade China’s industry including the manufacturing sector. In Industry 4.0 and Made-in-China 2025, many applications require a combination of recently emerging new technologies, which is giving rise to the emergence of Industry 4.0. Such technologies originate from different disciplines including cyber-physical Systems, IoT, cloud computing, Industrial Integration, Enterprise Architecture, SOA, Business Process Management, Industrial Information Integration and others. At this present moment, the lack of powerful tools still poses a major obstacle for exploiting the full potential of Industry 4.0. In particular, formal methods and systems methods are crucial for realising Industry 4.0, which poses unique challenges. In this paper, we briefly survey the state of the art in the area of Industry 4.0 as it relates to industries.
As quality requirements play a crucial role in supply chain management (SCM), enterprises require appropriate information architecture to address evolving supply chain needs. Information architecture for supply chain quality management has drawn much attention from the research community and the industry in recent years. Recent research explores the role of service-oriented architecture (SOA), RFID, agent, workflow management, and the Internet of Things (IoT) as an enabler of real-time quality management and control in the supply chain. This paper attempts to analyse the current state of the art in information management for supply chain quality management, reviewing the current research and development in information architecture for supply chain quality management, and highlighting some of the key technologies that have the potential to significantly improve the performance of supply chain quality management. It is our hope that this paper will motivate the supply chain quality management community in deploying the technologies along with their breakthroughs with the objective of realising automated supply chain quality management.
Floods and water resource management are major challenges for human in present and the near future, and snowmelt floods which usually break out in arid or semi-arid regions often cause tremendous social and economic losses, and integrated information system (IIS) is valuable to scientific and public decision-making. This paper presents an integrated approach to snowmelt floods early-warning based on geoinformatics (i.e. remote sensing (RS), geographical information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS)), Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud services. It consists of main components such as infrastructure and devices in IoT, cloud information warehouse, management tools, applications and services, the results from a case study shows that the effectiveness of flood prediction and decision-making can be improved by using the IIS. The prototype system implemented in this paper is valuable to the acquisition, management and sharing of multi-source information in snowmelt flood early-warning even in other tasks of water resource management. The contribution of this work includes developing a prototype IIS for snowmelt flood early-warning in water resource management with the combination of IoT, Geoinformatics and Cloud Service, with the IIS, everyone could be a sensor of IoT and a contributor of the information warehouse, professional users and public are both servers and clients for information management and services. Furthermore, the IIS provides a preliminary framework of e-Science in resources management and environment science. This study highlights the crucial significance of a systematic approach toward IISs for effective resource and environment management.
1 March 2006 in Systems Research and Behavioral Science