Industry 4.0 has attracted the attention of manufacturing companies over the past ten years. Despite efforts in research and knowledge transfer from research to practice, the introduction of Industry 4.0 concepts and technologies is still a major challenge for many companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Many of these SMEs have no overview of existing Industry 4.0 concepts and technologies, how they are implemented in their own companies, and which concepts and technologies should primarily be focused on future Industry 4.0 implementation measures. The aim of this research was to develop an assessment model for SMEs that is easy to apply, provides a clear overview of existing Industry 4.0 concepts, and supports SMEs in defining their individual strategy to introduce Industry 4.0 in their firm. The maturity level-based assessment tool presented in this work includes a catalog of 42 Industry 4.0 concepts and a norm strategy based on the results of the assessment to support SMEs in introducing the most promising concepts. For testing and validation purposes, the assessment model has been applied in a field study with 17 industrial companies.

When cyber-physical systems (CPS) are connected to perform smart manufacturing, we have a cyber-physical production system (CPPS). In such systems, CPS collaborate in an intelligent way to obtain and maintain the optimum of the manufacturing process, handle disturbances and adapt to changing conditions. This work, based on a systematic literature review, shows current trends in cyber-physical production systems with a special focus on the role of connectivity and control systems in production. We are looking for the enablers of CPPS focusing on the current evolution of control systems in the smart factory of the future. As a result, a conceptual framework as well as a CPPS control system architecture for the introduction and organisation of enablers for CPPS is presented to support practitioners in the realisation of smart manufacturing control concepts.

Inside smart factories, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have to be synchronized one with another and with the external world to share information and trigger actions. In this work, the conceptual development of such a network to implement a Smart Factory at the Mini-Factory Laboratory of the Free University of Bolzano is presented. The objective is to set up a framework for an Industrial Internet System (IIS), first by homogenizing and integrating the communication systems of the end-nodes of the laboratory, i.e., sensors, robots, etc., through the necessary hardware and middleware, and second, by constructing a centralized backbone network where all valuable information is collected for further big data analysis

Collaborative robotics is one of the main drivers of the fourth industrial revolution where robots and humans cooperate in a shared workspace. Such kind of robots are distinguished from the traditional robots by several features that, if tuned correctly, ensure safe physical interaction. How- ever, robots also represent a potential source of psychological stress. Indeed, it has been proven that working and sharing the workspace with robots can psychologically stress the operator. This drawback — in addition to the reduced speed operation imposed by safety standards — represent a constraint difficult to bear in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), due an inherent lack of expertise in robotics. In this paper, we propose a novel trajectory planner for collaborative robots able to ensure both psychological and physical safety. We rely on available literature and the calculus of variations to identify a family of psychologically acceptable minimum-jerk trajectories. From such family we compute the fastest trajectory that limits the physical danger represented by the robot. A numerical implementation of the method is discussed and experimental results prove the effectiveness of the idea