Manufacturing as a Data-Driven Practice: Methodologies, Technologies, and Tools

In recent years, the introduction and exploitation of innovative information technologies in industrial contexts have led to the continuous growth of digital shop floor environments. The new Industry 4.0 model allows smart factories to become very advanced IT industries, generating an ever-increasing amount of valuable data. As a consequence, the necessity of powerful and reliable software architectures is becoming prominent along with data-driven methodologies to extract useful and hidden knowledge supporting the decision-making process. This article discusses the latest software technologies needed to collect, manage, and elaborate all data generated through innovative Internet-of-Things (IoT) architectures deployed over the production line, with the aim of extracting useful knowledge for the orchestration of high-level control services that can generate added business value. This survey covers the entire data life cycle in manufacturing environments, discussing key functional and methodological aspects along with a rich and properly classified set of technologies and tools, useful to add intelligence to data-driven services. Therefore, it serves both as a first guided step toward the rich landscape of the literature for readers approaching this field and as a global yet detailed overview of the current state of the art in the Industry 4.0 domain for experts. As a case study, we discuss, in detail, the deployment of the proposed solutions for two research project demonstrators, showing their ability to mitigate manufacturing line interruptions and reduce the corresponding impacts and costs.