The scientific theme of the book is “Sustainability for the digital manufacturing era” which is focused on how the technological enablers of digital systems drive the sustainability for products, processes, manufacturing, and logistics systems in the industry of the future. The book’s chapters describe sustainability drivers specific to the technological advances that motivate, encourage, and engage the economic, social, and environmental aspects within intelligent manufacturing and logistics systems. The novelty of this approach consists in extending the economic sustainability of digital manufacturing with the ethical perspective at human social scale. The general scope of the book is to foster innovation in smart and sustainable manufacturing and logistics systems and in this context to promote concepts, methods, and solutions for the digital transformation of manufacturing through service orientation in holonic and agent-based control with distributed intelligence. The book’s readership is comprised of researchers and engineers working in the value chain of products and processes, who develop digital control solutions in the “Industry of the Future” vision. The book is also addressed to master’s and Ph.D. students enrolled in Engineering Sciences programs.

The scientific theme of the book concerns “Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS)” which is developed in a layered cloud networked manufacturing perspective, from the shop floor resource sharing model to the virtual enterprise collaborative model, by distributing the cost of the manufacturing infrastructure - equipment, software, maintenance, networking - across all customers.

The scientific theme of the book concerns “Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS)” which is developed in a layered cloud networked manufacturing perspective, from the shop floor resource sharing model to the virtual enterprise collaborative model, by distributing the cost of the manufacturing infrastructure - equipment, software, maintenance, networking - across all customers.