The business transformation towards smart manufacturing: a literature overview about reference models and research agenda

Nowadays, the introduction of digital technologies in the manufacturing industries paved the way to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, fostering the evolution of traditional industrial systems to the concept of smart manufacturing. In last years, many reference models to describe the features of the smart factories have been proposed in literature. This paper aims at presenting an overview of these models in order to find the gaps in the research about the Industry 4.0 concepts. In particular, the business transformation required to evolve the traditional manufacturing systems into Industry 4.0-ready ones is discussed. Finally, future research topics are proposed.