Track: Master Thesis Competition

Abstract

The manufacturing model developed in the third industrial revolution is going through a disruption process that will permanently change the way goods will be designed, manufactured and delivered to consumers. The fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 rises from two main factors: (i) the demands of a rising portion of consumers who are highly connected, whose hyper customized and immediate consumption patterns tend to favor services despite products, and (ii) the breakthrough of digital technologies that permeate various segments of the modern society. For this new industrial paradigm, the purpose is to merge physical and virtual worlds, building environments where data and information will become the great assets of business models and human intervention in the manufacturing process will be even lesser than what's envisioned for the third industrial revolution. However, bringing this concept into reality is not trivial and there is a need for extensive planning of the physical, technological, and organizational transformations that will be needed to achieve its goals. In this work, two aspects of the manufacturing industry's digitalization process will be exploited: its technical requirements and the demanded strategic competencies. In the technical sphere, there is a range of technologies generally considered by the literature as the backbone of Industry 4.0. Through exploratory research, these technologies will be evaluated, and their characteristics analyzed to identify how they interact with one another and if there are dependencies among them, determining an implementation roadmap that is technically coherent. Within the strategic purview, the competencies enabled by these technologies will be associated with the competencies elected by the German Academy of Science and Engineering on its Industry 4.0 Maturity Index as necessary to reach this new model's strategic goals. Once determined the technical and strategical interactions between the elected technologies, this work purposes a systemic roadmap for the implementation of Industry 4.0 enabling technologies, that defines a path for the digitalization process of the manufacturing industry.