An improved cyber-physical systems architecture for Industry 4.0 smart factories

The cyber-physical system is the core concept of Industry 4.0 for building smart factories. We can rely on the ISA-95 architecture or the 5C architecture to build the cyber-physical system for smart factories. However, both architectures emphasize more on vertical integration and less on horizontal integration. This article proposes the 8C architecture by adding 3C facets into the 5C architecture. The 3C facets are coalition, customer, and content. The proposed 8C architecture is a helpful guideline to build the cyber-physical system for smart factories. We show an example of designing and developing, on the basis of the proposed 8C architecture, a smart factory cyber-physical system, including an Industrial Internet of Things gateway and a smart factory data center running in the cloud environment.