Service Computing for Industry 4.0: State of the Art, Challenges, and Research Opportunities

Recent advances in the large-scale adoption of information and communication technologies in manufacturing processes, known as Industry 4.0 or Smart Manufacturing, provide us a window into how the manufacturing sector will evolve in the coming decades. As a result of these initiatives, manufacturing firms have started to integrate a series of emerging technologies into their processes that will change the way products are designed, manufactured, and consumed. This article provides a comprehensive review of how service-oriented computing is being employed to develop the required software infrastructure for Industry 4.0 and identifies the major challenges and research opportunities that ensue. Particular attention is paid to the microservices architecture, which is increasingly recognized as offering a promising approach for developing innovative industrial applications. This literature review is based on the current state of the art on service computing for Industry 4.0 as described in a large corpus of recently published research papers, which helped us to identify and explore a series of challenges and opportunities for the development of this emerging technology frontier, with the goal of facilitating its widespread adoption.