Industrial Applications of the Internet of Things

In the age of Industry 4.0, a substantial concern for modern manufacturing organizations in optimizing production processes under an Internet of Things (IoT) framework is noted. Moreover, given the significant volume of production, energy efficiency is an inevitable issue. To a great extent, improving production performance depends on the development of new technologies. As a result, this research targets to conduct a research review for the implementation of industry 4.0 technologies in continuous manufacturing. While there is a significant amount of research on batch manufacturing and industry 4.0, continuous manufacturing is less addressed in these scientific works. In an attempt to fill this gap, we try to understand the transition from batch processing manufacturing to continuous processing manufacturing within certain industries, emphasizing the benefits of industry 4.0 relevant to the industry and sustainability. Another crucial part of this study is identifying open issues and challenges of industry 4.0 infrastructure in continuous manufacturing. For such reason, we developed two research questions that we will try to answer during this work. The first one is which are the technologies being implemented as part of industry 4.0 in continuous manufacturing and the second one, does the implementation of such technologies in continuous manufacturing led to energy efficiency improvement.