Enabled by the development of internet technologies, cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) are expected to open up entirely new possibilities to improve the efficiency of existing assembly systems of industrial companies. Nevertheless, realizing the potential of CPPS still remains a difficult task for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), given the high variety of improvement possibilities offered by CPPS enabling technologies and the limited resources for their deployment. Hence, it is

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... ecessary to develop an implementation strategy of CPPS. Meanwhile, the consideration of location factors could support industrial companies to identify the appropriate CPPS implementation strategy since the location factors highly effect assembly system environment. In this context, a new approach to analyse the influence of location factors on the implementation of CPPS is exposed in this paper, which aims at investigating and identifying of relationships in between. Firstly, an application map of CPPS is generated. Secondly, the manufacturing industry status analyzed and subsequently a catalog of currently important location factors for the assembly systems are identified. Then a qualitative model of a relational analysis is established by an agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm. An industrial case study is used to demonstrate the applicability and the validity of the proposed approach.