A review on the characteristics of cyber-physical systems for the future smart factories

The emergence of new technologies is providing new ways to compete in the current context of changeable and unpredictable market requirements. The focus of this paper is on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), as one of the most promising transformative technological concept of such a context, thus considered by literature as the building blocks of future smart factories. However, CPSs are still in their conceptualization phase. To this end, much literature effort has been put on their technological characterization, while there is a lack of knowledge on the operations management characterization to manage such new systems. To contribute in this latter direction, this paper reviews literature in order to distinguish between technological characteristics of CPSs and operations management characteristics to build future CPS-based smart factories. This paper remarks the need for research on operations management characteristics as these may be the ones actually leading operations managers to the concrete implementation of CPS-based factories in manufacturing.