Enabling technologies, impacts and challenges of “Industry 4.0” in the manufacturing context: some insights from a preliminary literature review

The initiative of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) has been proposed in Germany in 2011. From that moment, both academical and industrial communities started to be interested in this new paradigm due to its potential capability of transforming traditional manufacturing systems into flexible, customizable and autonomous ones. Indeed, scholars have provided contributions aimed at developing a framework for Industry 4.0 related concepts such as smart factory, factory of the future (FoF) and cyber physical systems (CPS). Furthermore, the literature investigates vertical and horizontal integration enabled by Industry 4.0 enabling technologies, as well as their industrial practices. Nonetheless, a comprehensive understanding of the concept of Industry 4.0 evaluating the overall plethora of I4.0 enabling technologies has been addressed by very few studies in the literature. Moreover, the potential impacts as well as the challenges related to the application of Industry 4.0 are scattered in different studies. On that basis, this paper aims at presenting a state-of-art of industry 4.0 paradigm applied in the manufacturing context. In particular, this study focuses on identifying i) the I4.0 enabling technologies; ii) the achievable benefits and faced obstacles in adopting I4.0 paradigm and; iii) the human- and sustainability- related factors effected by Industry 4.0. This objective has been achieved based on the preliminary results of a literature review of 73 papers selected from Scopus and Web-of-Science databases. The (preliminary) results allowed to point out the main elements emerging from the sample analyzed, as well as their level of diffusion within the literature. Although various contributions have been written on Industry 4.0 area, the majority of them are focused on the impacts of digital enabling technologies in the domain of smart factory, stressing the topic of production scheduling and maintenance. Less attention has been paid on the improvement of product or service development and to the reconfiguration of the supply chain in the I4.0 era. This paper also shows that human and sustainability related aspects are less focused, but there is an increasing trend in recent years. Besides, even though the implementation of I4.0 enabling technologies in single business processes has been addressed by several works in the literature, utilization of combination of different technologies and a clear definition of what types of benefits they can bring out, is under-investigated.