Guest Editorial: Thematic Section on Applications of Emerging Computing Technologies in Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0

The papers in this special section focus on applications of emerging computing technologies in smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0. Both of these paradigms are transforming factories into highly complex IT systems, generating massive amounts of data. The modeling and optimization of smart industrial processes, to support decision making, has consequently become a new application domain, with its own unique and peculiar issues, for some of the most prominent emerging technologies across the entire computing stack, from hardware and systems design to applicationlevel software. The massive data collection which forms the foundation of digital industries is enabled by increasingly complex and heterogeneous cyber physical systems (CPSs). Owing to that, the design of software for CPSs is receiving renewed interest from research and industry in relation to challenges such as managing variability and dependencies with an unprecedented degree of customization.