ORIGINAL ARTICLE Perspectives on Manufacturing Automation Under the Digital and Cyber Convergence Shimon Y. Nof 1 & Jose Reinaldo Silva 2 Received: 11 July 2018 /Accepted: 16 July 2018 /Published online: 10 August 2018 # Escola Politécnica - Universidade de São Paulo 2018 Abstract The evolution of industrial automation has been divided into four or five main cycles of Bindustrial revolutions,^ also called Bdisruptive innovations^ and Bautomation revolutions.^ The most recent one, started around the 1990s and still on- going, points to the current perspectives envisioned for the twenty-first century and perhaps even beyond. In practice, however, it is difficult to comprehend the real value and impacts by the so called Digital Manufacturing, Smart Factory, Automation 5.0, or Industry 4.0. Furthermore, with frequent and rapid innovations, it is unclear how the emerging digital, smart, and cyber-augmented factories of the future can benefit from the digital and cyber convergence. Which are the dominant factors that motivate and justify the evolution of manufacturing through this current cycle? In this article, we review the relationships between digital, virtual, and cyber convergence, and recent manufacturing engineering challenges ranging from virtual enterprises to collaborative e-Manufacturing, and service orientation. We then point out new per- spectives and opportunities for design and re-arrangement in production, highlighting the trend of fusion between knowl- edge, product, process, and service. The impact on methods of analysis, informatics, collaborative intelligence, and design of industrial systems is also analyzed under the new trends and achievements so far in digital and cyber convergence. With several case studies, we also illustrate the emerging challenges. Keywords Manufacturing automation . Digital and cyber convergence . Cyber-physical manufacturing . Product-service architecture . Collaborative e-Manufacturing . Best matching 1 Introduction Since the second half of the past century, the fruitful coupling between academic developments and industry progress has become more harmonized and synchronized, even if time de- lays inevitably persist between them. The endeavors of evolu- tion on both sides opened a new stage, where change agents in industry and academy share leadership in innovation. That was the case with a set of new production concepts called (by industry) Industry 4.0 (Hermann et al. 2016; Moghaddam and Nof 2017b; Roblek et al. 2016) and Automation 5.0 (by industry and academy) as related to cyber-physical conver- gence (Conti et al. 2012; Monostori 2014; Rajkumar et al. 2010; Nof et al. 2015, 2017; Nof 2017). The full comprehen- sion of the concept (Hermann et al. 2016) and its implementa- tion over the legacy systems became one of the great engineer- ing challenges in the current era. One of the difficulties is to rationalize and to fit the newly developed approaches in the industry development process. It began in the second half of the past century with the discovery of transistors and the advent of the computer. In fact, digital computation changed and disrupted practically everything in modern life. It has been especially evident after all communication and communication media turned to be digital, in a process called Bdigital convergence. ^ After that transformation, Bcomputers^ and Bcomputation^ became ubiquitous and present in all processes of human life and activities, from agriculture to space missions, from scientific explorations and healthcare to education. Industrial production is a fun- damental human activity and has the characteristics of a legacy process that is actually aimed to support and sustain human life and activities in modern society. * Jose Reinaldo Silva reinaldo@usp.br Shimon Y. Nof nof@purdue.edu 1 Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA 2 Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil Polytechnica (2018) 1:36–47 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41050-018-0006-0