This work examines how AI, especially agentic systems, is being adopted in engineering and manufacturing workflows, what value it provides today, and what is needed for broader deployment. This is an exploratory and qualitative state-of-practice study grounded in over 30 interviews across four stakeholder groups (large enterprises, small/medium firms, AI developers, and CAD/CAM/CAE vendors). We find that near-term AI gains cluster around structured, repetitive work and data-intensive synthesis, while higher-value agentic gains come from orchestrating multi-step workflows across tools. Adoption is constrained less by model capability than by fragmented and machine-unfriendly data, stringent security and regulatory requirements, and limited API-accessible legacy toolchains. Reliability, verification, and auditability are central requirements for adoption, driving human-in-the-loop frameworks and governance aligned with existing engineering reviews. Beyond technical barriers there are also organizational ones: a persistent AI literacy gap, cultural heterogeneity, and governance structures that have not yet caught up with agentic capabilities. Together, the findings point to a staged p
Requirements engineering in Industry 4.0 faces critical challenges with heterogeneous, unstructured documentation spanning technical specifications, supplier lists, and compliance standards. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) shows promise for knowledge-intensive tasks, no prior work has evaluated RAG on authentic industrial RE workflows using comprehensive production-grade performance metrics. This paper presents a comprehensive empirical evaluation of RAG for industrial requirements engineering automation using authentic automotive manufacturing documentation comprising 669 requirements across four specification standards (MBN 9666-1, MBN 9666-2, BQF 9666-5, MBN 9666-9) spanning 2015-2023, plus 49 supplier qualifications with extensive supporting documentation. Through controlled comparisons with BERT-based and ungrounded LLM approaches, the framework achieves 98.2% extraction accuracy with complete traceability, outperforming baselines by 24.4% and 19.6%, respectively. Hybrid semantic-lexical retrieval achieves MRR of 0.847. Expert quality assessment averaged 4.32/5.0 across five dimensions. The evaluation demonstrates 83% reduction in manual analysis time and 47% cost s
In the rapidly evolving field of software engineering, the skills required of graduates entering the job market are constantly changing. Several studies have identified a gap between the skills taught in university curricula and those demanded by the software engineering industry. This chapter investigates the technical skill and expertise gap between higher education institutions (HEIs) and the UK software engineering industry by mapping job descriptions to the skills included in computer science degree programmes. A custom web scraping and text analysis tool, utilising fuzzy matching, was developed to extract and categorise skills from 300 job postings and undergraduate curricula from 30 UK universities. The analysis showed that the curricula place a strong emphasis on Programming Languages (18%) and Database Management (12.83%). In contrast, the industry s most frequently requested skill category is Software Design and Planning, which appears in approximately 88.68% of job descriptions, highlighting its critical importance. General Programming Language and System Structures also show strong demand, present in over 78.30% and 66.04% of postings, respectively. The mapping indicate
Automated surface defect detection is critical for ensuring rigorous quality control in high-speed manufacturing environments. While deep learning models offer remarkable accuracy, deploying them on resource-constrained edge hardware without introducing significant latency remains a persistent challenge. This paper presents Industrial-YOLO, an edge-optimized framework built upon a fine-tuned YOLOv8 architecture specifically engineered for real-time industrial defect detection. We conduct a systematic benchmark utilizing the NEU surface defect database for steel sheets and the MVTec AD dataset, supplemented with custom automotive manufacturing extensions representing real-world structural anomalies (scratches, pits, and inclusions). To bridge the gap between algorithmic complexity and edge hardware constraints, target-specific optimizations are introduced via TensorRT and OpenVINO acceleration engines. Experimental results demonstrate that Industrial-YOLO achieves a high-velocity inference speed exceeding 120 FPS on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin platform while maintaining an exceptional mean Average Precision (mAP) of 98.5%. The proposed framework showcases highly robust, zero-latency perf
Software engineering conferences bring together thousands of academicians and software practitioners so that academic research and professional practices can influence each other. In essence, a symbiotic relationship exists between the research community and the software industry, which must be maintained, nurtured and re-examined periodically. Given the major AI breakthroughs (e.g., LLMs) and large-scale adoption of AI by the software industry, a re-examination of the relationship between academia and the SE industry is highly warranted. In this position paper, we argue that the software engineering community is deeply concerned about its research impact and relevance to industry practices. By conducting an empirical study using the survey responses from the SE community, we not only provide compelling evidence supporting our position but also propose new calls for action and reforms in SE, and thus envision a new future for the software engineering community.
Reverse engineering can be used to derive a 3D model of an existing physical part when such a model is not readily available. For parts that will be fabricated with subtractive and formative manufacturing processes, existing reverse engineering techniques can be readily applied, but parts produced with additive manufacturing can present new challenges due to the high level of process-induced distortions and unique part attributes. This paper introduces an integrated 3D scanning and process simulation data-driven framework to minimize distortions of reverse-engineered additively manufactured components. This framework employs iterative finite element simulations to predict geometric distortions to minimize errors between the predicted and measured geometrical deviations of the key dimensional characteristics of the part. The effectiveness of this approach is then demonstrated by reverse engineering two Inconel-718 components manufactured using laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing. This paper presents a remanufacturing process that combines reverse engineering and additive manufacturing, leveraging geometric feature-based part compensation through process simulation. Our ap
An attack taxonomy offers a consistent and structured classification scheme to systematically understand, identify, and classify cybersecurity threat attributes. However, existing taxonomies only focus on a narrow range of attacks and limited threat attributes, lacking a comprehensive characterization of manufacturing cybersecurity threats. There is little to no focus on characterizing threat actors and their intent, specific system and machine behavioral deviations introduced by cyberattacks, system-level and operational implications of attacks, and potential countermeasures against those attacks. To close this pressing research gap, this work proposes a comprehensive attack taxonomy for a holistic understanding and characterization of cybersecurity threats in manufacturing systems. Specifically, it introduces taxonomical classifications for threat actors and their intent and potential alterations in system behavior due to threat events. The proposed taxonomy categorizes attack methods/vectors and targets/locations and incorporates operational and system-level attack impacts. This paper also presents a classification structure for countermeasures, provides examples of potential co
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) is a discipline that applies algebraic topology techniques to analyze complex, multi-dimensional data. Although it is a relatively new field, TDA has been widely and successfully applied across various domains, such as medicine, materials science, and biology. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art of TDA within a dynamic and promising application area: industrial manufacturing and production, particularly within the Industry 4.0 context. We have conducted a rigorous and reproducible literature search focusing on TDA applications in industrial production and manufacturing settings. The identified works are categorized based on their application areas within the manufacturing process and the types of input data. We highlight the principal advantages of TDA tools in this context, address the challenges encountered and the future potential of the field. Furthermore, we identify TDA methods that are currently underexploited in specific industrial areas and discuss how their application could be beneficial, with the aim of stimulating further research in this field. This work seeks to bridge the theoretical advancements in TDA with the p
This position paper examines the substantial divide between academia and industry within quantum software engineering. For example, while academic research related to debugging and testing predominantly focuses on a limited subset of primarily quantum-specific issues, industry practitioners face a broader range of practical concerns, including software integration, compatibility, and real-world implementation hurdles. This disconnect mainly arises due to academia's limited access to industry practices and the often confidential, competitive nature of quantum development in commercial settings. As a result, academic advancements often fail to translate into actionable tools and methodologies that meet industry needs. By analyzing discussions within quantum developer forums, we identify key gaps in focus and resource availability that hinder progress on both sides. We propose collaborative efforts aimed at developing practical tools, methodologies, and best practices to bridge this divide, enabling academia to address the application-driven needs of industry and fostering a more aligned, sustainable ecosystem for quantum software development.
Context: The use of standards is considered a vital part of any engineering discipline. So one could expect that standards play an important role in Requirements Engineering (RE) as well. However, little is known about the actual knowledge and use of RE-related standards in industry. Objective: In this article, we investigate to which extent standards and related artifacts such as templates or guidelines are known and used by RE practitioners. Method: To this end, we have conducted a questionnaire-based online survey. We could analyze the replies from 90 RE practitioners using a combination of closed and open-text questions. Results: Our results indicate that the knowledge and use of standards and related artifacts in RE is less widespread than one might expect from an engineering perspective. For example, about 47% of the respondents working as requirements engineers or business analysts do not know the core standard in RE, ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148. Participants in our study mostly use standards by personal decision rather than being imposed by their respective company, customer, or regulator. Beyond insufficient knowledge, we also found cultural and organizational factors impeding the
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in solving complex problems in various fields, including oil and gas engineering and other industrial engineering disciplines like factory automation, PLC programming etc. However, automatic identification of strong and weak solutions to fundamental physics equations governing several industrial processes remain a challenging task. This paper identifies the limitation of current LLM approaches, particularly ChatGPT in selected practical problems native to oil and gas engineering but not exclusively. The performance of ChatGPT in solving complex problems in oil and gas engineering is discussed and the areas where LLMs are most effective are presented.
Over twenty years ago, the Software Engineering (SE) research community have been involved with Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE). EBSE aims to inform industrial practice with the best evidence from rigorous research, preferably from systematic literature reviews (SLRs). Since then, SE researchers have conducted many SLRs, perfected their SLR procedures, proposed alternative ways of presenting their results (such as Evidence Briefings), and profusely discussed how to conduct research that impacts practice. Nevertheless, there is still a feeling that SLRs' results are not reaching practitioners. Something is missing. In this vision paper, we introduce Evidence to Decision (EtD) frameworks from the health sciences, which propose gathering experts in panels to assess the existing best evidence about the impact of an intervention in all relevant outcomes and make structured recommendations based on them. The insight we can leverage from EtD frameworks is not their structure per se but all the relevant criteria for making recommendations to practitioners from SLRs. Furthermore, we provide a worked example based on an SE SLR. We also discuss the challenges the SE research and pr
Industry 4.0 is a blend of the hyper-connected digital industry within two world of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT). With this amalgamate opportunity, smart manufacturing involves production assets with the manufacturing equipment having its own intelligence, while the system-wide intelligence is provided by the cyber layer. However Smart manufacturing now becomes one of the prime targets of cyber threats due to vulnerabilities in the existing process of operation. Since smart manufacturing covers a vast area of production industries from cyber physical system to additive manufacturing, to autonomous vehicles, to cloud based IIoT (Industrial IoT), to robotic production, cyber threat stands out with this regard questioning about how to connect manufacturing resources by network, how to integrate a whole process chain for a factory production etc. Cybersecurity confidentiality, integrity and availability expose their essential existence for the proper operational thread model known as digital thread ensuring secure manufacturing. In this work, a literature survey is presented from the existing threat models, attack vectors and future challenges over the di
There is an increasing interest in research on the combination of AI techniques and methods with MDE. However, there is a gap between AI and MDE practices, as well as between researchers and practitioners. This paper tackles this gap by reporting on industrial requirements in this field. In the AIDOaRt research project, practitioners and researchers collaborate on AI-augmented automation supporting modeling, coding, testing, monitoring, and continuous development in cyber-physical systems. The project specifically lies at the intersection of industry and academia collaboration with several industrial use cases. Through a process of elicitation and refinement, 78 high-level requirements were defined, and generalized into 30 generic requirements by the AIDOaRt partners. The main contribution of this paper is the set of generic requirements from the project for enhancing the development of cyber-physical systems with artificial intelligence, DevOps, and model-driven engineering, identifying the hot spots of industry needs in the interactions of MDE and AI. Future work will refine, implement and evaluate solutions toward these requirements in industry contexts.
Within the ever-evolving landscape of engineering, particularly in the dynamic domain of additive In manufacturing, a pursuit of precision and excellence in production processes takes centre stage. This research , This paper serves to give a comprehensive understanding of piezoelectric sensors, a topic that is both academically engaging and of practical significance, catering to both seasoned experts and those newly venturing into the field. Additive manufacturing, lauded for its groundbreaking potential, underscores the imperative of rigorous quality control. This introduces piezoelectric sensors, devices that may be unfamiliar to many but possess considerable potential. This paper embarks on a methodical journey, commencing with an introductory elucidation of the piezoelectric effect. It then advances to the vital role of piezoelectric sensors in real-time monitoring and quality control, unveiling their potential and relevance for newcomers and seasoned professionals alike. This research, structured systematically from fundamental principles to pragmatic applications, presents findings that are not only academically informative but also represent a substantial stride towards achi
Identifying appropriate manufacturing systems for products can be considered a pivotal manufacturing task contributing to the optimization of operational and planning activities. It has gained importance in the food industry due to the distinct constraints and considerations posed by perishable and non-perishable items in this problem. Hence, this study proposes a new mathematical model according to knowledge discovery as well as an assignment model to optimize manufacturing systems for perishable, non-perishable, and hybrid products tailored to meet their unique characteristics. In the presented model, three objective functions are taken into account: (1) minimizing production costs by assigning the products to the right set of manufacturing systems, (2) maximizing the product quality by assigning the products to the systems, and (3) minimizing total CO2 emissions of the machines. A numerical example is utilized to evaluate the performance of AUGMECON2VIKOR compared to AUGMECON2. The results show that AUGMECON2VIKOR obtains superior Pareto solutions across all objective functions. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis explores the positive green impacts, influencing both cost and
A physics-informed neural network is developed to solve conductive heat transfer partial differential equation (PDE), along with convective heat transfer PDEs as boundary conditions (BCs), in manufacturing and engineering applications where parts are heated in ovens. Since convective coefficients are typically unknown, current analysis approaches based on trial and error finite element (FE) simulations are slow. The loss function is defined based on errors to satisfy PDE, BCs and initial condition. An adaptive normalizing scheme is developed to reduce loss terms simultaneously. In addition, theory of heat transfer is used for feature engineering. The predictions for 1D and 2D cases are validated by comparing with FE results. It is shown that using engineered features, heat transfer beyond the training zone can be predicted. Trained model allows for fast evaluation of a range of BCs to develop feedback loops, realizing Industry 4.0 concept of active manufacturing control based on sensor data.
Metarobotics aims to combine next generation wireless communication, multi-sense immersion, and collective intelligence to provide a pervasive, itinerant, and non-invasive access and interaction with distant robotized applications. Industry and society are expected to benefit from these functionalities. For instance, robot programmers will no longer travel worldwide to plan and test robot motions, even collaboratively. Instead, they will have a personalized access to robots and their environments from anywhere, thus spending more time with family and friends. Students enrolled in robotics courses will be taught under authentic industrial conditions in real-time. This paper describes objectives of Metarobotics in society, industry, and in-between. It identifies and surveys technologies likely to enable their completion and provides an architecture to put forward the interplay of key components of Metarobotics. Potentials for self-determination, self-efficacy, and work-life-flexibility in robotics-related applications in Society 5.0, Industry 4.0, and Industry 5.0 are outlined.
The software engineering researchers from countries with smaller economies, particularly non-English speaking ones, represent valuable minorities within the software engineering community. As researchers from Poland, we represent such a country. We analyzed the ICSE FOSE (Future of Software Engineering) community survey through reflexive thematic analysis to show our viewpoint on key software community issues. We believe that the main problem is the growing research-industry gap, which particularly impacts smaller communities and small local companies. Based on this analysis and our experiences, we present a set of recommendations for improvements that would enhance software engineering research and industrial collaborations in smaller economies.
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly gained popularity and are being embedded into professional applications due to their capabilities in generating human-like content. However, unquestioned reliance on their outputs and recommendations can be problematic as LLMs can reinforce societal biases and stereotypes. This study investigates how LLMs, specifically OpenAI's GPT-4 and Microsoft Copilot, can reinforce gender and racial stereotypes within the software engineering (SE) profession through both textual and graphical outputs. We used each LLM to generate 300 profiles, consisting of 100 gender-based and 50 gender-neutral profiles, for a recruitment scenario in SE roles. Recommendations were generated for each profile and evaluated against the job requirements for four distinct SE positions. Each LLM was asked to select the top 5 candidates and subsequently the best candidate for each role. Each LLM was also asked to generate images for the top 5 candidates, providing a dataset for analysing potential biases in both text-based selections and visual representations. Our analysis reveals that both models preferred male and Caucasian profiles, particularly for senior roles, and fav