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

Scanning the Industry 4.0: A Literature Review on Technologies for Manufacturing Systems

As the industrial requirements change at a rapid pace due to the drastic evolution of technology, the necessity of quickly investigating potential system alternatives towards a more efficient manuf...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00207543.2019.1636321

Simulation in the design and operation of manufacturing systems: state of the art and new trends

Small and medium-sized enterprises face the challenges that they do not have enough employees and related resources to produce high-quality products with limited budget and time. The emergence of c...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1687814018814395

Exploring product design quality control and assurance under both traditional and crowdsourcing-based design environments

Cyber- Physical Systems and Education 4.0 -The Teaching Factory 4.0 Concept

Augmented Reality Application to Support Remote Maintenance as a Service in the Robotics Industry

Cloud-Based Augmented Reality Remote Maintenance Through Shop-Floor Monitoring: A Product-Service System Approach

Despite the high automatization that characterizes modern production, human operators still hold a vital position in manufacturing, which should be reinforced in the transition to the era of Industry 4.0. As human operators may support increased flexibility and adaptability to their tasks, they gain an advantage in highly customized productions, where products’ configuration and tasks allocated per workstation may be dynamically changed. In order to support dynamic knowledge transfer to the human operators in a way that is perceivable and does not limit operators’ capabilities, it is important to exploit novel visualization technologies introduced by Industry 4.0. This paper presents an automated approach for remotely supporting assembly workstations, with human operators using augmented reality technology. The system retrieves the workstation’s schedule and automatically generates assembly instructions, utilizing information from the product’s design, enriched with order-specific annotations based on product customization. Then, the generated augmented reality instructions are transmitted through a cloud environment to the assembly station operator, aiming to support dynamic production re-scheduling. The developed system is validated in a real-life case study provided by the automotive industry.

Vasilios Zogopoulos

Papers

Cyber- Physical Systems and Education 4.0 -The Teaching Factory 4.0 Concept

Augmented Reality Application to Support Remote Maintenance as a Service in the Robotics Industry

Cloud-Based Augmented Reality Remote Maintenance Through Shop-Floor Monitoring: A Product-Service System Approach

Augmented reality application to support the assembly of highly customized products and to adapt to production re-scheduling

Augmented Reality based Visualization of CAM Instructions towards Industry 4.0 paradigm: a CNC Bending Machine case study