Decentralized Cyber-Physical Systems: A Paradigm for Cloud-Based Smart Factory of Industry 4.0

The trend of future manufacturing requires manufacturers to sustainable optimize the utilization of resources (e.g. people, equipment, material, methods, and environment) to lean produce high quality product, and quickly adapts to changes of market demands and supply chain partners. German’s Industry 4.0 has attracted extensive attention in the world in recent years, which is believed to be a new paradigm to meet the ever changing requirements of future manufacturing. Industry 4.0 focuses on building cyber-physical systems (CPS) based product creation eco-system with highly flexible and reasonable cost with just-in-time reactivity. However, on the way to build such an eco-system is still need effort to investigate technological foundations of CPS and deeply cognitive understanding of key concepts with considering the context of implementation of industry 4.0 landscape. In the context, this chapter introduces the conceptual model and operation mechanism of decentralized cyber-physical systems (CPS), which enables manufacturers to utilize a cloud-based agent approach to create an intelligent collaborative environment for product creation. A brief introduction to the connotation of industry 4.0 and smart factory of industry 4.0 from the perspective of China’s industry and academic is given. The concept of decentralized cyber-physical systems agents is proposed and discussed, with the focus on conceptual model, operation mechanism and key technologies. After that, a cloud-based smart manufacturing paradigm is presented. The architecture and business process model of such a paradigm is developed. Finally, a case study of how a manufacturing enterprise uses the proposed paradigm to implement the smart factory of industry 4.0 in China. This study benefits both academic researchers and industrial engineers and decision makers with the proposed paradigm as well as case study.