A comprehensive survey of ubiquitous manufacturing research

In the past 10 years, ubiquitous manufacturing (UM) has received a growing amount of attention among researchers in the manufacturing community because ubiquitous computing technologies (UCTs) can be applied to address a wide range of issues in the manufacturing industry, e.g. manufacturing processes and equipment, manufacturing management and planning. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, there is a lack of comprehensive and critical review from a holistic view of the state-of-the-art UM and its systems. This paper aims to provide a concise overview of the technical features, characteristics and broad range of applications of UM systems published between 1997 and 2017. Among these selected articles, more than 70% of them were published between 2012 and 2017, and they are considered as recent pertinent works which will be discussed in detail. The unique aspects of this paper lie in that this paper summarises and analyses a broad range of the state-of-the-art implementation of UM systems from a holistic and comprehensive view of manufacturing technology, including UM for manufacturing processes, manufacturing control systems, logistics, remanufacturing, cloud manufacturing, production scheduling, production quality control and evaluation, etc. In addition, the current limitation factors and future trends of UM development will also be discussed.