A review of recent reference architectures for cyber-physical systems, in the Industry 4.0 Era

With the uptake of the IoT in the industrial domain, a whole new range of cyber-physical systems has emerged; Industry 4.0 is the title given to this technological domain of highly interconnected, data-rich systems. To aid the development of such systems, a range of reference architectures has been developed throughout the years. This paper reviews a number of recent reference architectures, detailing their essential traits as well as identifying aspects that need to be further explored in order to obtain reference architectures better tuned to generating cyber-physical social systems. © 2018 Lucian BlagaUniversity of Sibiu.