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In the past five years, several industrial initiatives such as “Industry 4.0”, “Industrial Internet of Things”, “Factories of the Future” and “Made in China 2025”, have been announced by different governments and industrial leaders. These initiatives lead to an urgent need to advance current manufacturing systems into a high level of intelligence and autonomy. As the main component of any manufacturing system, machine tools have evolved from manually operated machines into the current computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine tools. It is predicted that current CNC machine tools are not intelligent and autonomous enough to support the smart manufacturing systems envisioned by the aforementioned initiatives. Inspired by recent advances in ICT such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT), this paper proposes a new generation of machine tools, i.e. Machine Tool 4.0, as a future …