In October 2019 the 45th IEEE Conference of the Industrial Electronics Society (IECON) took place in Lisbon. Part of the conference was also the Special Session 'Distributed machineries and smart systems for material handling and smart manufacturing using Industry 4.0 technologies', which was organized by the project partners ETRI, IFAK and University of Rostock. In this session, six papers were presented and discussed. Overall, research results by the partners IFAK, ETRI, UC3M, SOTEC, THORSIS, ERSTE, COMNOVO and University of Rostock were presented at the conference.