Current status, future developments and recent patents on big data technique in process control systems

Background: Data volume and multitude of sources have experienced exponential growth in manufacture process and are facing with the challenge of Industry 4.0. Objective: The purpose of this study is to provide an overview about the recent patents on big data in process control systems and explain how big data technique settles the problems in different manufacturing processes. Methods: The research method and patent analysis are employed for use in this study. Results: Current and future developments of the patents on big data in process control systems are finally provided to improve the current process control systems and big data technique applications. Conclusions: It is suggested that future work should focus on developing big data algorithms appropriate for manufacturing operations, combination of modern and traditional information techniques, models for manufacturing supply chain collaboration, models for data collection and generation based on more powerful big data devices, and new data skew handling methods. © 2016 Bentham Science Publishers.