Industry 4.0: How it is defined from a sociotechnical perspective and how much sustainability it includes – A literature review

By Grischa Beier, André Ullrich, Silke Niehoff, Malte Reißig, Matthew Habich. 2020

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Industry 4.0 has had a strong influence on the debate on the digitalization of industrial processes, despite being criticized for lacking a proper definition. However, Industry 4.0 might offer a huge chance to align the goals of a sustainable development with the ongoing digital transformation in industrial development. The main contribution of this paper is therefore twofold. We provide a de-facto definition of the concept “Industry 4.0” from a sociotechnical perspective based on its most often cited key features, as well as a thorough review of how far the concept of sustainability is incorporated in it.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66181de782a0a2ac73a64626c6fbe57982b5adc5