Thomas Bangemann Editor

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Armando Walter Colombo is currently Director of the Institute for Industrial Informatics, Automation and Robotics (I2AR) and Edison L2 Group Senior Expert and Research Program Manager at Schneider Electric Automation GmbH. His research interests are in the fields of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), collaborative automation, intelligent supervisory control, formal specification of flexible automation systems. Prof. Colombo has authored/co-authored over 200 publications (peer-reviewed) in journals, books and chapters of books and conference proceedings and is co-author of 23 industrial patent applications. He is a senior member of the IEEE, member of the Administrative Committee (AdCom) of the IEEE Industrial Electronic Society and member of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. Prof. Colombo is the Schneider Electric representative in ARTEMIS (European Embedded Systems Platform), co-leading the Sub-Program ASP 4 associated to the ARTEMIS Strategic Research Agenda and he acts as expert of the Framework Programs of the European Commission.

Dr. Thomas Bangemann is Deputy Head of the ifak Institut f. Automation und Kommunikation e.V., Magdeburg. Formerly he headed the departments of IT and Automation as well as of Industrial Communication Systems at ifak. His focus is on the subjects of industrial communication and automation systems and their application as well as the introduction of information and integration technologies into these areas. During the last few years he has been involved in several European and national funded projects, e.g. SOCRADES, AIMES, PROTEUS or IMC-AESOP. He is a member of several working groups within the ZVEI (Steering Committee for Communication in Automation), VDI/VDE-GMA (Cyber Physical Systems) and PROFIBUS International and he also gives lectures for Process Control at the University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal.

Stamatis Karnouskos is an Expert on M2M / Internet of Things within SAP. He investigates the added-value of integrating networked embedded devices in enterprise systems. For more than 15 years Stamatis leads efforts in several European Commission and industry funded projects related to industrial automation, smart grids, Internet-based services and architectures, software agents, mobile commerce, security and mobility. He serves in the technical advisory board of Internet Protocol for Smart Objects Alliance (IPSO), and the Permanent Stakeholder Group of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).

Prof. Jerker Delsing is chaired Professor in Industrial Electronics Luleå University of Technology, Sweden since 1995, where he is leading the EISLAB group. Present research focus is on Internet of Things, IoT, System of Systems, SoS and Service Oriented Architectures, SOA. Results are applied to Automation in production having Collaborative automation as a long term vision. He has published more than 150 papers in peer reviewed journals and conferences. He is currently the coordinator of Europe's largest automation project Arrowhead. He is further a member of the steering board of Artemisia, ProcessIt Innovations and ProcessIT.EU.

Dr. Petr Stluka is Engineering Fellow in Honeywell Labs and lead of the Data-Centric Technology group since 2004, driving research efforts of the group in the fields of statistical modelling, predictive analytics, optimisation and decision support in application areas related to industrial process plants, buildings and homes. In his role, he is closely working with Honeywell technology and marketing leaders and contributing actively to strategic roadmaps. He received MSc in 1995 and PhD in 1998 from Prague Institute of Chemical Technology, both in the field of technical cybernetics. Petr Stluka has seven U.S. patents and has authored more than five other patent applications. He is author or co-author of more than 50 technical publications. His research interests include alarm management, event processing techniques, and industrial energy efficiency.

Prof. Robert Harrison is Director of the Automation Systems Group in WMG at the University of Warwick. He has core expertise in the design and application of reconfigurable automation systems and related virtual engineering tools and methods. He is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed international journal and conference papers. Working very closely with industry, Prof Harrison has international experience in SOA and component-based systems engineering. He has been involved in many European and national projects including IMC-AESOP, SOCRADES and EPSRC Business Driven Automation, and his current research in the field of cyber-physical systems includes the EPSRC Knowledge Driven Configurable Manufacturing, ARTEMIS Arrowhead, and the TSB Direct Digital Deployment and Augmented Manufacturing Reality projects.

Francois Jammes was the director of the ``Web services'' internal Schneider Electric project, which was investigating and deploying the SOA concepts and Web services technology inside the group. He is a Schneider Edison group senior expert, coordinating the relationship between this organisation and the other Schneider Business Units. He is involved in several Building Automation related European collaborative projects from the FP7 framework, and he is also an expert for the European Commission in this application domain. He is holding many European and international patents, and published many related articles in IEEE journals and conferences.

Prof. Jose Lastra joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Systems of Tampere University of Technology in January 2014 as the director of FAST-Lab, a research unit devoted to the seamless integration of humans' knowledge and intelligent machines/systems. His research interest is on applying ICT technologies to Factory Automation, with focus on manufacturing systems based on autonomous embedded networked production units. Prof. Lastra has authored over 200 scientific papers and holds a number of patents in the field of Industrial Automation. He has extensive experience in industry as consultant for the development of networked embedded control systems, including the first industrial implementations using Java-based embedded industrial controllers in USA.