A Review of Modern Communication Technologies for Digital Manufacturing Processes in Industry 4.0

Digital manufacturing technologies have quickly become ubiquitous in the manufacturing industry. The transformation commonly referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, has ushered in a wide range of communication technologies, connection mechanisms, and data analysis capabilities. These technologies provide powerful tools to create more lean, profitable, and data-driven manufacturing processes. This paper reviews modern communication technologies and connection architectures for Digital Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 applications. An introduction to cyber-physical systems and a review of digital manufacturing trends is followed by an overview of data acquisition methods for manufacturing processes. Numerous communication protocols are presented and discussed for connecting disparate machines and processes. Flexible data architectures are discussed, and examples of machine monitoring implementations are provided. Finally, select implementations of these communication protocols and architectures are surveyed with recommendations for future architecture implementations.