A Survey on the Use of Lightweight Virtualization in I4.0 Manufacturing Environments

Over the past decade, in the industrial sector we have witnessed the rise of a revolutionary movement, known as Industry 4.0, that promotes the digital transformation as the key to increase the competitiveness of manufacturing factories. Among the many technologies recognized as "drivers" of such revolutionary transition, microservices stand out as a software development paradigm capable of bringing several benefits to the manufacturing process. Whilst the literature offers many examples of initiatives exploiting microservices in digitally-advanced sectors (e.g., finance, telecommunication, retailing), its potential in the industrial manufacturing is yet to be fully unleashed. We conducted an extensive literature survey in the twofold aim of bringing to the reader's attention the many benefits that the microservices paradigm may offer in industrial manufacturing settings, and drawing a picture of how light virtualization techniques are actually being exploited to achieve Industry 4.0 digitization goals. In this paper, we propose a structured analysis of the collected literature proposals which combines the benefits sought by authors when approaching to the microservices techniques and the specific scope of application of proposals. We conclude the paper highlighting the research aspects that have not been sufficiently explored in the literature and that would deserve further attention in the near future.