IEEE WFCS: A Historical Perspective

This document presents a historical overview of the IEEE International Conference on Factory Communication Systems (WFCS), covering its development from the first edition in 1995 to its current status as an established IEEE conference. It documents key milestones, organizational changes, conference locations, and publication practices, as well as the evolution of core research topics in industrial communication, including real-time systems, fault tolerance, wireless networks, and Industrial IoT. This work also provides statistical data on submissions and accepted papers and reviews the most cited contributions in the history of WFCS. --- This work builds upon “30 years of WFCS: from 1995 in Leysin onward” by Frank Golatowski and Stefano Scanzio, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA 4.0). The original work is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15839247. The present work includes modifications and additional contributions. This work is distributed under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license.