Editorial to the special issue “Enterprise modelling and system integration for smart manufacturing”

Smart Manufacturing is made of “fully-integrated, collaborative manufacturing systems that respond in real time to meet changing demands and conditions in the factory, in the supply network, and in customer needs” [5]. However, Smart Manufacturing has been also defined as “the ability to solve existing and future problems via an open infrastructure that allows solutions to be implemented at the speed of business while creating advantaged value" [7]. By the way, Smart Manufacturing is being predicted as the next Industrial Revolution, enabled by the recent technology connectivity and the unprecedented access to and sharing of data [4]. However, Smart Manufacturing implies numerous challenges, such as the need of integrating data from multiple devices and sensors, sharing information among different vendor applications and products that can be composed to form new solutions, and synchronizing the involved systems at the right time [9]. Thanks to the recent advances in ICT, such technologies can be applied to a single machine, to an entire factory, or across a network of suppliers and customers. As a consequence, the merge of physical and virtual items (the so-called CPS, Cyber Physical Systems) opens up new areas of innovation that can optimize the entire manufacturing industry to create higher quality products, improve productivity, increase energy efficiency, and sustain safer plant floors.