Theodor Borangiu (editor) - Service Oriented, Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing Systems for Industry of the Future: Proceedings of SOHOMA 2020 (Studies in Computational Intelligence, 952)

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I would like to thank the SOHOMA Steering Committee for offering me the opportunity to share my views and ideas with the SOHOMA community and the manufacturing control and systems domain researchers at large. I worked in manufacturing control for more than twenty years and have witnessed the research progress of the domain from the first distributed architectures, including first holonic manufacturing systems models, to the myriad models for digital transformation of manufacturing through service orientation, and to the distributed intelligence models that are employed in what was recently called manufacturing as a service or shortly MaaS. The SOHOMA workshop, now at its anniversary tenth edition, has always kept with the times and even went through a few name changes to better capture the evolving nature of our work as a community. But, nevertheless, it always welcomed submissions from around the world covering cutting-edge manufacturing control modelling, promoted transformative research and moved forward the knowledge frontier. As confirmation, the last SOHOMA workshop held in October featured the overarching theme manufacturing as a servicevirtualizing and encapsulating manufacturing resources and controls into cloud networked services and, to name a few, included articles covering MaaS aspects such as cloud-based manufacturing control, digital twins in manufacturing, holonic and multi-agent process control, ethics and social automation, human factors integration, and physical Internet and logistics.

This foreword makes an attempt to capture the readers attention by highlighting current MaaS developments, as well as outline potential areas of research for the SOHOMA community and beyond. Manufacturing as a service includes local and potentially geographical distributed, service-oriented, knowledge-based smart manufacturing models that provide customized design and product solutions to individual or group-based customer types. It leverages technologies such as big data analytics, cloud, edge and fog computing, digital twins, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), including deep learning, 3D printing, 5G broadband and SDN networks, and Internet of things. All within constraints such as high efficiency, safety of operations, cybersecurity of digital transactions, ethics, humanmachine interaction, low energy consumption and reduced logistics imprint. Including synergistic processes such as design as a service (DaaS), predict as a service (PraaS) and maintain as a service (MAaaS) results in bringing into being of a robust, responsive, secure, value chain-based and customer-oriented MaaS ecosystem that goes beyond the separate smart factory or digital manufacturing solutions. The quintessential research objective to accomplish this vision is to investigate the seamless integration of the above technologies into the MaaS ecosystem. SOHOMA researchers already started the heavy lifting for this daring task by building on the previous editions of the workshop and especially on the work presented at the current anniversary edition.