The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs) is a network of connected devices that play a significant role in collecting and transmitting data securely. Such data can then be evaluated to gain insights for enhancing manufacturing (industry 5.0), business processes, and applications. IIoT is a demand service model that has wide opportunities in smart industry, automation, optimization, control, intelligent manufacturing, management, maintenance, and the attainment of industrial digital transformation. Business technology can interconnect people with the development devices, data, and systems that reside in the digitalized world and utilize IIoT.

With the rapid development of electronic, information, and advanced manufacturing technology, the production model of manufacturing enterprises is being transformed from digital to intelligent, and virtual reality technology-based on cyber-physical systems (CPS) is being developed and deployed. With the development of such new technologies, the advantages of using traditional manufacturing methodologies are diminishing. Consequently, intelligent manufacturing technology is becoming a focus of highly industrialized countries. The Europe 2021 strategy, Industry 5.0 strategy and China manufacturing 2025 have been proposed. The United States has gradually accelerated reindustrialization and manufacturing reflow. Industry 5.0 needs to be able to manage issues such as cost efficiency, fault tolerance, autonomous decision-making, full lifecycle traceability control, business-intelligence capabilities, new forms of human-machine interaction, and energy-efficiency demands. Industry 5.0 must also be capable of handling cooperative tasks, have a high capacity to handle data processing and address issues with ICT tools. The use of information communication technologies such as the Internet of things (IoT), augmented and virtual reality, and fog and edge computing can enable novel cyber-secured, resilient, human-centric, and context-aware applications to face these challenges.

This Special Issue discusses the advances in IIoT. We welcome original research and review papers focusing on the various aspects of emerging technologies in IIoT which can provide smart transformation of industry.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Industrial internet of things-based architecture and protocol design for smart factory 5.0
• Resource management in industrial IoT systems
• 5G and IoT-based future industrial automation for ultra-reliable low-latency
• Security, safety, and privacy issues in the industrial internet of things and applications in smart factory 5.0
• Performance evaluation, simulation, RF measurements, and modeling of industrial IoT systems in a smart factory 5.0
• Intelligent machine to machine communications in industrial IoT for smart factory 5.0
• Cognitive industrial IoT systems for applications in smart factory 5.0
• Cloud-based industrial internet of things solutions for digital manufacturing
• Current challenges of industrial internet of things-based enabling technologies for smart manufacturing