Recently, the advences of Industry 4.0 have paved the way for a systematical deployment of the smart grid (SG) to manage continuously growing energy demand of the 21st century. This even allows the fourth stage of the industrial revolution in the power sector, which is known as the smart grid industry (SGI) 4.0. In SGI 4.0, the industrial wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the Internet of Things are envisioned as key promising communication technologies for monitoring various SG applications due to their large-scale coverage, fault tolerance characteristics, and cost reduction. However, highly dynamic nature of the SG environments brings several unique challenges caused by systems and operating devices. This results in hampering the quality-of-service communication requirements for WSNs-based SG applications. In SGI 4.0, the routing infrastructure not only requires a reliable but also fulfills the communication requirements of diverse SG applications. Thus, a sophisticated, reliable and QoS-aware multi-hop communications network architecture enabling a real-time exchange of data for various WSNs-based SG applications is essential in SGI 4.0. Hence, this paper proposes a novel bio-inspired self-optimized butterfly mating optimization-based data gathering routing scheme called Self-optimized Intelligent routing protocol (SIRP) for WSNs-based SG applications. The extensive simulations reveal that the proposed scheme achieves its defined goals compared to existing routing schemes designed for WSNs-based applications.Trans Emerging Tel Tech. 2019;30:e3503.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ett streamline management operations are connected using wired networks working over industrial protocols in traditional factories. However, compared with a wired network, the wireless networking solution plays a complementary role to empower control and management competencies of the factory elements in I 4.0. To this end, industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) are envisioned as a valuable technology to realize the vision of I 4.0 because of their low-cost sensing, identifying, processing, and networking capabilities. The IWSNs provide physical industry world information to a user located in a remote location to realize distinct objectives. 10,11 The fundamental characteristics of IWSN-based networking solution in I 4.0 is to provide least maintenance cost by avoiding excessive breakdowns in a defined time interval for enabling smart production reliability and increasing economic benefits. Therefore, IWSN, with these aims, has revealed its prominence in various industrial applications, including modern agriculture, transportation, steel mills, healthcare systems, area surveillance, gas and oil industry, and many others. 12,13 The quality-of-service (QoS)-aware cooperative multihop communication in IoT-enabled smart grid (SG) is highly dependent on a number of performance metrics like coverage, scalability, stability, latency, lifetime, and complexity of the network. In IoT-enabled SG, IWSNs through IoT connect various industrial ...