Industrial production is a manifold and complex process holding several sub-steps from conceptual design over prototyping to fabrication and quality management. Here, visual visualization approaches can be applied in nearly each step in order to increase the quality of decision making processes. In this context, each step of the process contributes unique requirements for visualizations to be applicable.

At the same time, production lines gradually adopt the concepts of smart factories and smart manufacturing introduced by Industry 4.0. The production is becoming ever more oriented towards automation, flexibility, and high customization capabilities. Utilization of visualization brings potential to achieve the required flexibility and obtain a better insight into the expected results.

In order to realize the potential, several challenges need to be addressed. First, there is no taxonomy for visualization in industrial production. This is hard to achieve as different production areas have different requirements in terms of visualization. Second, companies and visualization researchers can follow different aims, which can make it hard to build a functional collaboration. Third, there are no mechanisms that keep track of already investigated or unsolved problems when it comes to visualization in industrial production.

In this special issue, we aim to explore different roles of visualization in the manufacturing industry that can benefit the complete process of industrial production. As the creation of a taxonomy is hard to achieve, we aim to exhibit successful approaches for industrial production from various branches in industry. Furthermore, we aim to bring together different actors in the field, such as visualization researchers, research institutes, and company fellows. Such diversity is crucial to help identify the open problems from different aspects.

We expect visualization researchers to introduce new approaches and technologies. The authors coming from research institutes will emphasize open questions in industry, based on experience coming from close collaboration with industry. Finally, we expect the authors coming from industry to highlight best practices, present state-of-the-art solutions, and describe challenges to drive the future research.

Here, the goal is to generate an overview of the role of visualization in the manufacturing industry, generate insights for visualization researchers to this manifold application, take a first step in understanding the state of the art of visualization in industrial production, and help open new discussion topics between the research community and industry professionals. We encourage authors to submit papers in one of the following areas:

* Requirements for visualization in different manufacturing industries
* Successful approaches (application examples) of visualization in different manufacturing industries
* Lessons learned from collaborations between researchers and companies in industrial manufacturing