Production technology is a highly interdisciplinary field of research. It comprises different production domains (cutting, welding, forming, assembly, etc.), industry-sectors, materials and scales. Moreover, production has strong interdependencies with other scientific disciplines such as product development, materials engineering, business economics, information and communication technology, social science and natural science. Integrative Production Technology aims to develop a deep technology spanning perception to offer products matching customer and societal demands at competitive prices and to quickly adapt to market and societal changes while assuring constant and predictable product properties. The Cluster of Excellence (CoE) "Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries" has initiated this special issue to present some of the newest results in the field. For a wider summary of results, the reader may refer to the recently published book of the CoE (Brecher and A-zdemir, Integrative production technology: theory and applications. Springer, Cham, 1).