The Role of Industry 4.0 Technologies in Manufacturing Sustainability Assessment

Abstract

To understand the past successes and future opportunities for applying Industry 4.0 technologies toward manufacturing sustainability assessment, this state-of-the-art review examines previous literature at the intersection of these domains. Specifically, we focus on the application of Industry 4.0 technologies in the context of the following stages in manufacturing sustainability assessment: (i) planning, infrastructure development, and problem definition, (ii) performance measurement, (iii) results interpretation and decision-making, as well as (iv) intervention, control, and validation strategies. On the basis of the literature review, we present the trends, benefits, research gaps, and required future work for holistically integrating the research domains mentioned above. To accompany this literature review, we performed a meta-analysis of 14,498 articles and compared them to 316 articles compiled from a focused literature search. Based on database-controlled keywords, networks representing keyword co-occurrences were constructed to reveal clusters of related terms and evaluate overall term centrality (i.e., importance). Results from this analysis showed that the two datasets exhibited a similar network structure and also helped reveal Industry 4.0-related opportunities for manufacturing sustainability assessment. They include areas such as automation, robotics, and advanced inspection technologies, which are yet to be exploited in manufacturing sustainability assessment. Further research is needed to investigate whether the incorporation of such areas can (i) facilitate more robust and accessible assessments of manufacturing sustainability and (ii) make manufacturing systems themselves more sustainable.