Guest Editorial: Heterogeneous Industrial Networks of the Current and Next-Generation Factories

This special section on heterogeneous industrial networks of the current and next-generation factories tackles a wide range of the issues mentioned above. Its main objective is both bringing together ideas from the worldwide research community about the directions in which the industrial networks’ development is headed and presenting the latest advances in the works related to industrial communication technologies to be potentially used in the future. All these concepts have to be evaluated keeping in mind that the evolution of these technologies is a fluid and continuous process. Probably, in the near future, industrial networks will be more and more heterogeneous for the introduction of new technologies with even more variegated characteristics, and application boundaries will be able to space from a single room to the whole world. Only a few articles are currently addressing intelligent and self-adaptive networks, and some of these works are included in this Special Section. Certainly, the introduction of relatively new paradigms for industrial communication such as SDN is the first important step for a network of the future on which to lay intelligent algorithms. These paradigms will have to also be extended to the wireless counterpart, bearing in mind that the adaptability to the intrinsic variability of the wireless medium and nodes mobility will remain research challenges for a long time. The eight articles selected for publication in this special section are briefly summarized here.