Ever increasing global competitive pressure, shrinking product lifecycles and fast changing technologies are driving companies, towards networking to remain in competition [
1]. Here, networking not only refers to the collaboration of companies within the supply chain, but more extents to the Internet of Things [
2]. Ranges of such Internet of Things varies from robot, machine and workers within the workshop, to individual factories within the production system. Besides, all possible units cycled within the value chain are also supposed to be interconnected [
3]. That means, boundaries among these objects would be weakened, where relative information can be collected and communicated autonomously for the intelligent support of decision maker. This is also the main scenario of Industrie 4.0. Here, Industrie 4.0 is defined as the trends for the increasing use of information and communication technologies for the autonomy within the manufacturing environment [
4].
Since the first announce in 2011, Industrie 4.0 has become a top priority of current industrial development. Two perspectives of ‘fascination’ have been witnessed in the worldwide [
3]. First, being aware of the importance of Industrie 4.0, many similar strategies have been launched in different countries. They are ‘National strategic plan for advanced manufacturing’ in the United States [
5], ‘The future of manufacturing: a new era of opportunity and challenge for the UK’, ‘Summary of the White Paper on Manufacturing Industry’ in Japan, ‘Made in China 2025’, and so on. Many relative funding programs and research initiatives have also been flourished under the support of government. This brings with the second perspective of fascination – the hot pursuit of academic researchers, where contributions related to the topics of Industrie 4.0 are prospered within a short time. Some attempts to describe on ‘what is Industrie 4.0’, where similar terminology, such as Internet of Things [
1], Cyber-Physical System [
6] and Smart factory [
7], have been highlighted for the understanding on this special object. Considering the visions listed out by the key promoter Industrie 4.0 Working Group [
7], there are also others who tried to design principles for the shape of Industrie 4.0 scenario in companies [
3]. Additionally, exploration and introduction of enabling technologies (e.g., visual computing) are composed as another research stream [
5]. All these help to establish a theoretical basis which aims to open the unexplored ex-post of Industrie 4.0. However, one major shortcoming can still be found: though it is widely researched, the common results on the researches of Industrie 4.0 are criticized to be too general to put into practice; or too detail to focus on one special industry and could not implicate to others [
4]. A reference architecture with the detail perspectives of Industrie 4.0 is, therefore, highly required for its implementation in practice. Moreover, considering the idea that Cyber-Physical System is one of the key enabler for the realization of Industrie 4.0 [
8], challenges for the application of Industrie 4.0 also emphasize on the solutions of Cyber-Physical System realization in companies. To cope with this, and with a vast study on the state of art in theory [
1‐
4] and also state of practice in companies [
5‐
7], a big gap can still be found between academy and practice. Therefore, in order to bridge channels between these two, experiences with applied cases are encouraged for the reveal and implication in industries.
Taken together, the purpose of this work is to provide an in-depth insight on the challenges and requirements for the application of Industrie 4.0. General work begins with the state of art. And based on the setup of a reference architecture, all relative enablers and perspectives are listed out for the interpretation and understanding of the item Industrie 4.0. Further work goes on with the establishment of Cyber-Physical System, which attempts to shed some light on the possible solutions for the implementation of Industrie 4.0. To close the gap between research and practice, some cases related to the application of Industrie 4.0 are further listed out for the demonstration.