Cyber-physical systems have encountered a huge success in the past decade in several scientific communities, and specifically in production topics. The main attraction of the concept relies in the fact that it encompasses many scientific topics that were distinct before. The downside is the lack of readability of the current developments about cyber-physical production systems (CPPS). Indeed, the large scientific area of CPPS makes it difficult to identify clearly and rapidly, in the various applications that were made of CPPS, what are the choices, best practices and methodology that are suggested and that could be used for a new application. This work intends to introduce an analysis framework able to classify those developments. An extensive study of literature enabled to extract the major criteria that are to be used in the framework, namely: Development Extent; Research Axis; Instrumenting; Communication standards; Intelligence deposit; Cognition level; Human factor. Several recent examples of CPPS developments in literature are used to illustrate the use of the framework and brief conclusions are drawn from the comparative analysis of those examples.

The flexibility claimed by the next generation production systems induces a deep modification of the behaviour and the core itself of the control systems. Over-connectivity and data management abilities targeted by Industry 4.0 paradigm enable the emergence of more flexible and reactive control systems, based on the cooperation of autonomous and connected entities in the decision-making process. From most relevant articles extracted from existing literature, a list of 10 key enablers for Industry 4.0 is first presented. During the last 20 years, the holonic paradigm has become a major paradigm of Intelligent Manufacturing Systems. After the presentation of the holonic paradigm and holon properties, this article highlights how historical and current holonic control architectures can partly fulfil I4.0 key enablers. The remaining unfulfilled key enablers are then the subject of an extensive discussion on the remaining research perspectives on holonic architectures needed to achieve a complete support of Industry4.0.