Industry 4.0: A survey on technologies, applications and open research issues

Abstract

Originally initiated in Germany, Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution, has attracted much attention in recent literatures. It is closely related with the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber Physical System (CPS), information and communications technology (ICT), Enterprise Architecture (EA), and Enterprise Integration (EI). Despite of the dynamic nature of the research on Industry 4.0, however, a systematic and extensive review of recent research on it is has been unavailable. Accordingly, this paper conducts a comprehensive review on Industry 4.0 and presents an overview of the content, scope, and findings of Industry 4.0 by examining the existing literatures in all of the databases within the Web of Science. Altogether, 88 papers related to Industry 4.0 are grouped into five research categories and reviewed. In addition, this paper outlines the critical issue of the interoperability of Industry 4.0, and proposes a conceptual framework of interoperability regarding Industry 4.0. Challenges and trends for future research on Industry 4.0 are discussed.

Introduction

Modern industry industrial development has lasted for several hundred years and has now the era of Industry 4.0 comes. The concept of Industry 4.0 was initially proposed for developing German economy in 2011 [60], [87]. According to Lukač [45], the first industrial revolution begins began at the end of the 18th century and is was represented by mechanical production plants based on water and steam power; the second industrial revolution starts started at the beginning of the 20th century with the symbol of mass labor production based on electrical energy; the third industrial revolution begins began in the 1970s with the characteristic of automatic production based on electronics and internet technology; and right now, the fourth industrial revolution, namely Industry 4.0, is ongoing, with the characteristics of cyber physical systems (CPS) production, based on heterogeneous data and knowledge integration. The main roles of CPS are to fulfill the agile and dynamic requirements of production, and to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the entire industry. Industry 4.0 encompasses numerous technologies and associated paradigms, including Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Internet of Things (IoT), cloud-based manufacturing, and social product development [5], [19], [36], [37], [41], [42], [55], [60], [75], [81], [82], [86], [88].

The goals of Industry 4.0 is are to achieve a higher level of operational efficiency and productivity, as well as a higher level of automatization [81]. As Roblek et al. [60] and Posada et al. [58] point out, the five major features of Industry 4.0 are digitization, optimization, and customization of production; automation and adaptation; human machine interaction (HMI); value-added services and businesses, and automatic data exchange and communication. These features not only are highly correlated with internet technologies and advanced algorithms, but they also indicate that Industry 4.0 is an industrial process of value adding and knowledge management.

Despite of the dynamic nature of the research on Industry 4.0, however, a systematic and extensive review of recent research on Industry 4.0 is not available. Accordingly, this paper conducts a comprehensive review on of Industry 4.0 and presents an overview of the content, scope, and findings of Industry 4.0 by examining existing literatures in all databases within the Web of Science and Google Scholar. Altogether, 88 papers related to Industry 4.0 are grouped into five research categories and are reviewed. In addition, this paper outlines the critical issue of the interoperability of Industry 4.0, and proposes a conceptual framework of interoperability regarding Industry 4.0. Challenges and trends for future research on Industry 4.0 are discussed.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows: the methodology of this study is introduced in Section 2. Section 3 groups the selected paper into five categories and reviews them in details. Challenges and directions for future research are introduced in each category. A framework of interoperability for Industry 4.0 is proposed as well. Section 4 summarizes and concludes this paper.