Intelligent Manufacturing Systems, Smart Factories and Industry 4.0: A General Overview

This chapter provides a general overview of what intelligent manufacturing systems are all about with a brief analysis of Artificial intelligence (AI). It highlights their effects in generating smart factories and supporting the industrial transformation of society. Intelligent manufacturing continues to take the advantage of improved AI capabilities to achieve better flexible and reconfigurable, as well as smart, manufacturing processes to experiment self-behaving manufacturing services. The developments in manufacturing systems, including the progress along with smart factories, big data analytics, cloud manufacturing, cybersecurity systems, and social manufacturing as well as some advanced methodologies, such as nanomanufacturing and additive manufacturing, will drive manufacturing operations. Bringing intelligent systems together for manufacturing is the main concern of intelligent manufacturing systems, as they can experiment on all characteristics of both AI and respective manufacturing functions. Smart factories aim to generate manufacturing environments with very little human involvement.