Data management

In Industry 4.0 all processes related to data, information and knowledge will change (Zhou et al., 2015). Technologically Industry 4.0“involves a new level of data integration and data processing” (Liu and Xu, 2017) for the manufacturing sector, which comes along with a“huge increase of variety, volume and velocity of data cre-ation”(Schmidt et al., 2015). Therefore, data-intensity (Bauer et al., 2015) and data exploitation (Erol et al., 2016) are considered rele-vant attributes of Industry 4.0. With the help of“data science and analytical models”(Xu et al., 2018),“data mining and big data”(Qin et al., 2016) these high volumes of data from multiple integrated systems are analyzed to enable supported decisions by intelligent technologies (Qin et al., 2016). Due to the heterogeneous nature of raw data, data integration through standardization, data exchange formats and model-based interoperability are key challenges in Industry 4.0 (Vogel-Heuser and Hess, 2016) for enabling continuous data and information exchange between involved devices and parties (Shrouf et al., 2014). Consequently, IT security, data pro-tection (Baur and Wee, 2015;Jazdi, 2014) and data validity (Li et al., 2017) are becoming increasingly important issues for the man-agement of decentralized data.

On the socialdimension (Paelke, 2014), raises the issue that workers must be supported in an environment characterized by high data volumes, while (Schuh et al., 2015) frames data-based automatic feedback and more easily interpretable data pre-processing and visualization as opportunities to support produc-tion workers in an Industry 4.0 environment. In (Zhou et al., 2015) privacy issues are seen as a potential social threat for employees.

Surprisingly neither mention the role and integration of the customer in Industry 4.0 nor do the energy requirements to store and manage the enormous amounts of data play any role in the relevant text fragments dealing with the topic ofdata management.

3.5. Consolidated definition of the established term industry 4.0 According to the results from the presented analysis different characteristics can be summarized for the role ofhumans, future

manufacturing organizations and the envisioned technologies to implement Industry 4.0.

Humans in an Industry 4.0 setting are expected to do less physical but more mental work, increasingly communicate with partners across the value chain and react to customer preferences.

They will be facing the challenge to collaborate with or manage more autonomous systems. Their tasks will be influenced by working in a more service-oriented organization. They will be interconnected with the manufacturing system through IoT tech-nology and supported by HMI solutions. They will work in fully integrated environments that are optimized for maximum effi -ciency, while their tasks will be influenced by decentralized deci-sion making.

On the technological side, highly efficient automated manufacturing systems will be interconnected building on the standards of the Industrial Internet of Things and a Service-oriented architecture, creating a so-called Industrial Internet of Things and Services. The informational intelligence of these manufacturing systems is based on CPS, IoT technology, Big Data approaches and an integrated but efficient management of relevant data. This combination is expected to allow manufacturing systems to become more autonomous andflexible, so that they can manu-facture customized products with comparably little extra effort.

Organizationsin Industry 4.0 need to make use of the above described technological opportunities to become decentralized and flexible, in order to being able to quickly adapt to frequently changing customer requirements. Preconditions for flexibility in organizations are interconnectedness, reconfigurable and modular systems, as well as effective communication between producers and consumers. Decentralized and more autonomous CPS are ex-pected to permeate throughout organizations. Business processes of organizations need to be integrated and to allow for more service-orientation while still being very efficient.

3.6. Sustainability aspects in established understanding of industry 4.0

Our second research question investigates to what extent sus-tainability aspects have been reflected in the understanding of the concept Industry 4.0 as it is provided by the most cited publications on Industry 4.0. Amongst other criteria we focus on topics related to SDGs 8 (decent work and economic growth), 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure)and 12 (responsible consumption and production).

Some text fragments highlight a positive influence on growth, productivity and work:“Industry 4.0 will allow us to achieve […] accelerated growth in productivity”(Thames and Schaefer, 2016) is a typical example for the growth assumption while the work-related modification of job profiles and the workforce is assumed to change “the competitiveness of companies and regions“ (Rüßmann et al., 2015). Although quite optimistic, both statements do not seem to be based on research results or calculations. None of the text fragments mention potential differences in countries of the Global South and North. Future working conditions are a part of the discussion about Industry 4.0 (see also category humanand key feature employee). Some publications mention the threat of losing especially jobs with low skill profiles through automation (Sommer, 2015; Stock and Seliger, 2016), while others expect a positive influence on working conditions: Industry 4.0“will free up more time for people to pursue their interests, which in turn en-ables more diverse andflexible career paths and will allow people to keep working and remain productive longer”(Xu et al., 2018).

Additionally, new technological tools will be applied which have the potential of improving working conditions through “ chrono-logical and spatialflexibility”(Heng, 2015) while also“increasing the intrinsic motivation and fostering creativity by establishing

new CPS-based approaches of work organization and design” (Stock and Seliger, 2016). Efficiency is considered the most impor-tant topic with regard to theenvironmentaldimension of sustain-ability. Industry 4.0 is expected“to present solutions to issues that need to be dealt with (such as the resource and energy efficiency, urban production, demographic change)”(Zhong et al., 2017). The technological development in the context of Industry 4.0 is believed to contribute to“a concept towards a holistic resource efficiency” (Stock and Seliger, 2016), “improve resource produc-tivity and efficiency”(Xu et al., 2018) and give rise“to completely new innovations with added value and business models that sup-port optimal resource utilization and smart control”(Jazdi, 2014).

Decentralization in the context of the categoryhumanis often part of a list of core principles without detailing what kind of decentralization is meant: “The principles of Industry 4.0 are interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, real-time capa-bility, service orientation, and modularity”(Lu, 2017). It is also not clear who or what will be in charge of taking decisions in future production processes - machines or humans:“The decision itself will be taken by the workers or by the equipment using methods from thefield of artificial intelligence” (Stock and Seliger, 2016).

From a sustainability point of view the question of who will be responsible - human or machine - is a rather relevant one with potential consequences for thesocialbut also the other dimensions.

This question is touched upon but not answered in the analyzed text fragments.

Very few text fragments focus on inclusive and sustainable industrialization or production patterns. One publication found that Industry 4.0“will bring benefits in four areas: productivity, revenue growth, employment, investment”(Rüßmann et al., 2015) efocusing exclusively on Germany though. Only (Gabriel and Pessl, 2016) addresses the special role of small and medium-sized en-terprises in an Industry 4.0 future concluding it can be a “key success factor for (international) competitiveness”, mainly due to the characteristics“lot size one, rapid response to customer, high quality andflexibility”. The same publication also states“systems can be optimized continuously during production process in terms of resources and energy consumption or emission output”(Gabriel and Pessl, 2016) picking up the topic of CO2 emissions and that“the most complex technical devices can be decomposed into its com-ponents at low cost and, subsequently, disposed or recycled” (Gabriel and Pessl, 2016) due to a future plus in product information.

The derived key features also show a great discrepancy with regard to how often they relate to the topic of sustainability - a parameter that is called“sustainability density”inTable 6. The two key features, where sustainability aspects seem to be an integral part (around three in four text fragments associated to this key feature deal with it) areemployees(mainlysocialdimension) and efficiency(predominantlyeconomic, half as oftenenvironmental). On the opposite side is the key featureBig Datawhere only one text fragment out of 24 is related to a sustainability issue. It is also apparent that the genuinely technical key features such asBig Data, Internet of ThingsandCyber-Physical Systemsdominate the lower third of the table.

From a sustainability point of vieweconomicandsocialaspects are the dominating dimensions within the analyzed body of liter-ature (seeTable 7). Despite the large number of socially relevant text fragments referring to thehumancategory, concrete implica-tions for future work and job profiles are mainly imprecise and vague. The samefinding applies to fragments referring toefficiency, where the majority of text fragments relates to economic issues promising either generally moreefficiencyor only concretizing the statement to more efficiency in production. For the categories technologyandorganizationeconomic aspects are by far the most

relevant sustainability topics. Many of these economic text frag-ments refer to the expectation that Industry 4.0 will provide for more (cost) efficiency in production (as described above) and open up opportunities for new business models and growth in general.

Environmentalaspects only play a minor role in all three categories;

most significantly in the categoryhuman.

4. Discussion

This article defines the concept Industry 4.0 from a socio-technical perspective by providing an in-depth overview its key features. This is not only interesting from a descriptive point of view i.e.finding a definition of the ill-defined term Industry 4.0 (see the research gap stated in section1), but also from an analytical point of view. How Industry 4.0 is perceived, defined and discussed is influencing the actual process of its development and implementation.

Afirst result is the vagueness of the term that still remains after our analysis. Although based on an extensive literature review the essential key features of Industry 4.0 were challenging to identify.

Following this observation Industry 4.0 does not seem to be a sharply defined, homogeneous development rather a collective term of different developments. One reason for this might be the also politically rather than purely scientifically motivated origin of the concept. Adding to this complexity is the fact, that the majority of key features is associated with more than one category and system level (Appendix IIIprovides an overview of all key features and how intensely each of them relates to thefivesystem levelsand effects&consequences). The huge overlap of key features between all categories underline that Industry 4.0 is a sociotechnical development that can and should not be reduced to technical as-pects (see also (Davies et al., 2017)).

The second related result concerns the lack of conformity

regarding positive outcomes of Industry 4.0. The transformation of industrial production is one of the biggest challenges for a sus-tainable development. However, it is not clear to what extent In-dustry 4.0 will contribute to this development. Sustainability aspects such as“decent job creation”and resource efficiency are mentioned but not explained or derived from research. Besides the threat for“unqualified workers” none of the analyzed text frag-ments takes on a differentiated view on future working conditions by, for instance, discussing the chances of women, younger workers or people with disabilities to be equally employed in an Industry 4.0 future. Many text fragments claim improved resource efficiency as a consequence of Industry 4.0. It is not made clear though under which circumstances those efficiency gains are to be expected. A detailed contribution of Industry 4.0 to a decoupling of growth and resource consumption is also missing (see (Hickel and Kallis, 2019) for a more general critique on that matter). A single publication mentions improvements with regard to decomposing and recy-cling, without providing any scientific reference. The fact that in order to enable Industry 4.0, all entities participating in a digitized and interconnected production need to be equipped with ICT in the first place is also not considered (see also (Fritzsche et al., 2018)).

Hardly any of the text fragments that postulate effects of key features on sustainability aspects provide any kind of evidence or a reference to such evidence. In total only 17 out of 684 text frag-ments describing the concept Industry 4.0 provide such evidence (see right column ofTable 6), which underlines the often more conceptual or subjective nature of the descriptions. In summary the analysis of sustainability aspects suggests that Industry 4.0 is associated with a number of desired outcomes, but hardly any of these mentioned positive sustainability aspects are a necessary result of digitalization. In other words only very few of the articles establish a scientific link between Industry 4.0 and sustainability aspects although often authors’ presentations are suggesting Table 6

Sustainability density of key features.

Key feature Nr. of text fragments (NTF)

NTF related to sustainability (NTF-Sus)

“sustainability density”(NTF-Sus/

NTF)

NTF-Sus with (reference to) empirical evidence

Employees 37 29 78% 1

Efficiency 58 43 74% 2

Collaboration 16 6 38% 1

Automation 35 13 37% 0

Customization 40 14 35% 0

Human-Machine Interaction

11 3 27% 0

Flexibility 38 10 26% 0

Decentralization 28 6 21% 0

Service-orientation 54 9 17% 0

Data management 43 7 16% 0

Communication 37 6 16% 0

Integration 56 8 14% 0

Cyber-Physical Systems 80 11 14% 0

Internet of Things 69 8 12% 1

Autonomy 54 6 11% 0

Interconnectedness 70 6 9% 0

Big Data 24 1 4% 0

Table 7

Number of sustainability related text fragments per category and dimension.

Overall text fragments Text fragments with relation to…dimension of sustainability

social environmental economic any

Human 157 88 15 35 97

Technology 544 64 44 99 151

Organization 480 68 52 111 159

Overall 689 93 63 140 213

otherwise. Sustainability aspects can therefore not be considered an integral part of the Industry 4.0 concept, but are rather treated as

“add-on features”. As a consequence sustainability aspects are not researched comprehensively and possible potentials are not identified.

A contribution to a sustainable development of industry can only be expected when the transformation includes clear in-tentions from the very beginning. The leading question should not be how much positive influence Industry 4.0 will have on sus-tainable development but how sussus-tainable digitalization of in-dustry could look like. A sustainable industrialization as envisioned by the sustainable development goals will need a more trans-formative approach of integrating sustainability. The mere adding of potential positive aspects might be more of a hindrance in this regard than a support. Another majorflaw with regard to a sus-tainable development is the lack of global consideration. Not a single text fragment within the scope of our analysis addressed potential social, environmental or economic implications of In-dustry 4.0 for the Global South. Hence InIn-dustry 4.0 sustains a rather traditional view on world economics and industrialization.

Industry 4.0 is often referred to as a disruption in industrial production. However, based on the analyzed publications it must be stated that the goals of Industry 4.0 follow traditional pathways.

Modern digital technologies are incorporated into traditional pro-duction environments. CPS-enhanced machines are getting inter-connected and equipped with so-called smart devices. This vision stands more for a digital update of the established patterns of in-dustrial production rather than a disruptive concept with a trans-formative potential. This is especially harmful when it comes to integrating sustainability aspects in industrial processes. Industry 4.0 as it is described in the analyzed literature seems to sustain the path dependencies of the“traditional”instead of initiating a sus-tainable industrialization.

Further research on Industry 4.0 could also benefit from a more interdisciplinary perspective. Most descriptions are techno-centric, naming lots of modern technological approaches. What is missing in the analyzed body of literature are complex scenarios and in-depth analyses of what these developments might imply for em-ployees or the environment. Especially when considering that humans still remain at the center of the dynamics between data and knowledge in Industry 4.0 (Kagermann et al., 2013;Dragicevic et al., 2019) and constitute the decisive factor for operationalizing sustainable development with the aid of information and communication technologies (Seele and Lock, 2017).

5. Conclusions

This paper closes a research gap identified by many publications in the past, systematically deriving and describing the constituting key features of the concept Industry 4.0 through a qualitative literature review. In addition to identifying a scientifically sound definition of the commonly established understanding of the concept Industry 4.0, this paper also contributes an analysis of how far its key features reflect sustainability aspects.

The validity of the analysis is limited by a number of factors. The understanding of the term is solely based on literature on Industry 4.0, derived from only one database and one search string. The incorporation of the search results from other databases, a bigger number of publications or related concepts such as Industrial Internet of Things or Advanced Manufacturing may enrich the understanding of the concept and might lead to a better repre-sentation of sustainability. Furthermore, changing the perspective by an investigation of sustainability-focusing journals may shed more light on the incorporation of this concept in contemporary developments in sustainable manufacturing and how sustainability

is represented in current manufacturing approaches. Additionally, the concept of sustainability and its representation in Industry 4.0 can be considered in more depth regarding intersections between the three dimensions covering thesocial,environmentaland eco-nomicaspects for more specific insights.

Industry 4.0 is not a single technology, but a sociotechnical concept in which technological, social and organizational aspects interact. Effects of individual aspects do not necessarily allow conclusions to be drawn about the overall impacts on the sus-tainability of the entire concept. Therefore, systemic studies that cover for example an entire value chain situated in broad system boundaries are necessary to be able to reliably estimate the actual sustainability implications of the concept Industry 4.0. More importantly, future research should consider the questions of how the concept of Industry 4.0 and its concrete implementation can contribute (1) to the realization of the United Nations sustainability development goals and (2) to sustainability aspects beyond effi -ciency and productivity. In summary, research in the context of Industry 4.0 has, thus far, failed to prove its benefits for a more sustainable production and, therefore, societal development. Our findings should encourage researchers working on Industry 4.0 to demonstrate specificeconomic,environmental, andsocietalbenefits and generally provide evidence regarding the effects of the con-cept’s implementation for sustainable development in different contexts. As reasoned in section4, these questions should neces-sarily be studied from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Funding

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (grant number: 01UU1705A/B) as part of its funding initiative“Social-Ecological Research“.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the reviewers and their valued colleagues Mandy Hoffmann, Luke Shuttleworth and Christof Thim for helping to improve the paper by proof reading the article.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.120856.

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