Manufacturing industry profoundly impact economic and societal progress. As being a commonly accepted term for research centers and universities, the Industry 4.0 initiative has received a splendid attention of the business and research community. Although the idea is not new and was on the agenda of academic research in many years with different perceptions, the term “Industry 4.0” is just launched and well accepted to some extend not only in academic life but also in the industrial society as well. While academic research focuses on understanding and defining the concept and trying to develop related systems, business models and respective methodologies, industry, on the other hand, focuses its attention on the change of industrial machine suits and intelligent products as well as potential customers on this progress. It is therefore important for the companies to primarily understand the features and content of the Industry 4.0 for potential transformation from machine dominant manufacturing to digital manufacturing. In order to achieve a successful transformation, they should clearly review their positions and respective potentials against basic requirements set forward for Industry 4.0 standard. This will allow them to generate a well-defined road map. There has been several approaches and discussions going on along this line, a several road maps are already proposed. Some of those are reviewed in this paper. However, the literature clearly indicates the lack of respective assessment methodologies. Since the implementation and applications of related theorems and definitions outlined for the 4th industrial revolution is not mature enough for most of the reel life implementations, a systematic approach for making respective assessments and evaluations seems to be urgently required for those who are intending to speed this transformation up. It is now main responsibility of the research community to developed technological infrastructure with physical systems, management models, business models as well as some well-defined Industry 4.0 scenarios in order to make the life for the practitioners easy. It is estimated by the experts that the Industry 4.0 and related progress along this line will have an enormous effect on social life. As outlined in the introduction, some social transformation is also expected. It is assumed that the robots will be more dominant in manufacturing, implanted technologies, cooperating and coordinating machines, self-decision-making systems, autonom problem solvers, learning machines, 3D printing etc. will dominate the production process. Wearable internet, big data analysis, sensor based life, smart city implementations or similar applications will be the main concern of the community. This social transformation will naturally trigger the manufacturing society to improve their manufacturing suits to cope with the customer requirements and sustain competitive advantage. A summary of the potential progress along this line is reviewed in introduction of the paper. It is so obvious that the future manufacturing systems will have a different vision composed of products, intelligence, communications and information network. This will bring about new business models to be dominant in industrial life. Another important issue to take into account is that the time span of this so-called revolution will be so short triggering a continues transformation process to yield some new industrial areas to emerge. This clearly puts a big pressure on manufacturers to learn, understand, design and implement the transformation process. Since the main motivation for finding the best way to follow this transformation, a comprehensive literature review will generate a remarkable support. This paper presents such a review for highlighting the progress and aims to help improve the awareness on the best experiences. It is intended to provide a clear idea for those wishing to generate a road map for digitizing the respective manufacturing suits. By presenting this review it is also intended to provide a hands-on library of Industry 4.0 to both academics as well as industrial practitioners. The top 100 headings, abstracts and key words (i.e. a total of 619 publications of any kind) for each search term were independently analyzed in order to ensure the reliability of the review process. Note that, this exhaustive literature review provides a concrete definition of Industry 4.0 and defines its six design principles such as interoperability, virtualization, local, real-time talent, service orientation and modularity. It seems that these principles have taken the attention of the scientists to carry out more variety of research on the subject and to develop implementable and appropriate scenarios. A comprehensive taxonomy of Industry 4.0 can also be developed through analyzing the results of this review.

Literature review of Industry 4.0 and related technologies

With the developments and applications of the new information technologies, such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence, a smart manufacturing era is coming. At the same time, various national manufacturing development strategies have been put forward, such as Industry 4.0 , Industrial Internet , manufacturing based on Cyber-Physical System , and Made in China 2025 . However, one of specific challenges to achieve smart manufacturing with these strategies is how to converge the manufacturing physical world and the virtual world, so as to realize a series of smart operations in the manufacturing process, including smart interconnection, smart interaction, smart control and management, etc. In this context, as a basic unit of manufacturing, shop-floor is required to reach the interaction and convergence between physical and virtual spaces, which is not only the imperative demand of smart manufacturing, but also the evolving trend of itself. Accordingly, a novel concept of digital twin shop-floor (DTS) based on digital twin is explored and its four key components are discussed, including physical shop-floor, virtual shop-floor, shop-floor service system, and shop-floor digital twin data. What is more, the operation mechanisms and implementing methods for DTS are studied and key technologies as well as challenges ahead are investigated, respectively.

Digital Twin Shop-Floor: A New Shop-Floor Paradigm Towards Smart Manufacturing

With the development of Industry 4.0 and the emergence of the smart factory concept, the traditional philosophy of manufacturing systems will change. The smart factory introduces changes to the factors and elements of traditional manufacturing systems and incorporates the current requirements of smart systems so that it can compete in the future. An increasing amount of research in both academia and industry is dedicated to transitioning the concept of the smart factory from theory to practice. The purpose of the current research is to highlight the perspectives that shape the smart factory and to suggest approaches and technical support to enable the realization of those perspectives. This paper fills this gap by identifying and analyzing research on smart factories. We suggest a framework to analyze existing research and investigate the elements and features of smart factory systems.

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1702/6/2/23/pdf

Requirements of the Smart Factory System: A Survey and Perspective

The digital revolution has brought many challenges and opportunities for the manufacturing firms. The impact of Industry 4.0 technology adoption on sustainable manufacturing and circular economy has been under-researched. This paper aims to review the latest articles in the area of Industry 4.0, sustainable manufacturing and circular economy and further developed a research framework showing key paths.,Qualitative research is performed in two stages. In the first stage, a review of the extant literature is performed to identify the barriers, drivers, challenges and opportunities. In the second stage, a research framework is proposed to integrate Industry 4.0 technology (big data analytics powered artificial intelligence) adoption, sustainable manufacturing and circular economy capabilities.,This research extends the knowledge base by providing a detailed review of Industry 4.0, sustainable manufacturing, and circular economy and proposes a research framework by integrating these three contemporary concepts in the context of supply chain management. Through an exploration of this integrative research framework, the authors propose a future research agenda and seven research propositions.,It is important to understand the interplay between institutional pressures, tangible resources and human skills for Industry 4.0 technology (big data analytics powered artificial intelligence) adoption. Industry 4.0 technology (big data analytics powered artificial intelligence) adoption can positively influence sustainable manufacturing and circular economy capabilities. Managers must also put more attention to sustainable manufacturing to develop circular economic capabilities.,Factory workers and the local communities generally suffer from various adverse effects resulting from the traditional manufacturing process. The quality of the environment is deteriorating to such an extent that people even staying miles away from the factory are also affected due to environmental pollution that is generated from factory operations. Hence, sustainable manufacturing is the only choice left to manufacturers that can help in the transition to a circular economy. The research framework can help firms to enhance circular economy capabilities.,This review paper contains the most updated work on Industry 4.0, sustainable manufacturing and circular economy. It also proposes a research framework to integrate these three concepts.

Relationships between industry 4.0, sustainable manufacturing and circular economy: proposal of a research framework

A framework to achieve sustainability in manufacturing organisations of developing economies using industry 4.0 technologies’ enablers

Decision support systems for sustainable manufacturing surrounding the product and production life cycle – A literature review

Using an interdisciplinary demonstration platform for teaching Industry 4.0

The connectivity between shop floor automation devices (OT level) and management systems (IT level) is becoming an essential research and innovation aspect that needs to be demonstrated with Technology Readiness Level six (TRL 6) and higher to make the Industry 4.0 paradigm an industrial reality. This paper describes the building of an Industry 4.0-compliant lab environment, which consists of a service-oriented shop floor (OT level) and three major management systems: an ERP system; a database; and a simulation for predictive maintenance (IT level). The architecture of the system follows the ISA'95 standard enterprise architecture, e.g. by assigning the components of the system to the corresponding levels of the ISA'95 model. A middleware acts as a common interface between these systems. Basic requirements for this middleware are interfaces to the lower level systems via OPC-UA and upper level systems by accessing a database. The middleware should be translated the data follows soft real-time requirements. This manuscript presents the major aspects that need to be taken into account for the selection of adequate industrial middleware, e.g. defining exactly which kind of data needs to be exchanged and with which semantics this data is going to be represented.

Building an Industry 4.0-compliant lab environment to demonstrate connectivity between shop floor and IT levels of an enterprise

Production facilities serve to transform raw materials into products, usually with the goal of achieving a designated output, in terms of quantity and quality, with the minimum of cost and labour. ...

Indicator framework for sustainable production planning and controlling

Industry 4.0 seeks to combine the real and cyber worlds by implementing cyber-physical systems (CPS) within industrial processes to create a self-managing network between humans, machines, products, and other related objects. An important part of the current transformation to Industry 4.0 is the emphasis on human-centricity, allowing for a paradigm shift from independent automated and human activities towards a human-automation symbiosis. This symbiosis is characterized by the cooperation between machines and humans in work systems and is designed not to replace the skills and abilities of humans, but rather to co-exist and assist humans in being more efficient and effective. The paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify principles for the human-centered design of future CPS. The SLR follows widely accepted methodologies and introduces concepts and visions for the elicitation of operators’ roles and needs in Industry 4.0.

Maximilian Zarte

Papers

Decision support systems for sustainable manufacturing surrounding the product and production life cycle – A literature review

Using an interdisciplinary demonstration platform for teaching Industry 4.0

Building an Industry 4.0-compliant lab environment to demonstrate connectivity between shop floor and IT levels of an enterprise

Indicator framework for sustainable production planning and controlling

Principles for Human-Centered System Design in Industry 4.0 – A Systematic Literature Review