Industry 4.0 and industrial revolutions: An assessment based on complexity

Abstract

The evolution of society can be related to industrial revolutions. Revolutions are disruptive and transformative phenomena that change and interact with several systems. Industrial revolutions depend on changes in scientific, and mostly technological, paradigms and require people's participation. They are not only created with individual political intentions, because they are collective and complex systems. The expression Industry 4.0, created in Germany in 2011, denotes the so-called fourth industrial revolution. The question considered in this paper is whether Industry 4.0, as the fourth industrial revolution, is effectively underway or is it still only a vision of the future? This article analyses, from the point of view of the science of complexity, the transformations and the relations of industrial systems with other selected systems. It was made through fractal analysis using indicators of four countries, namely, United Kingdom, United States of America, Germany and China. Considering the evolution of population growth, Gross Domestic Product per capita, communication technologies and intellectual property, the results of the analysis show that the factor that stands out is the protection of intellectual property. The analysis of the previous indicators showed that it is not possible to claim that the fourth industrial revolution is underway, implying that Industrial 4.0 may stil be a vision of the future. The results obtained can not be considered conclusive and more research is needed.

Application of the Industry 4.0 technologies to mobile learning and health education apps

“…To face the paradigm shift of an industrial revolution, people must be prepared for the disruptive changes that may arise. The 4 th industrial revolution has an impact in many areas in addition to the industrial one, including education (teaching and learning processes) [1]. In par-ticular, the field of education has the role of preparing new professionals, agents of the industry of the future -through a model called Education 4.0 -the starting point for such a paradigm shift [10].…”

“…Industry 4.0 represents a disruptive change in the way that communication technologies, distributed systems, intelligent data management, analytics and computational capability and other technologies are integrated to enable new functions and enhance capabilities in production systems [1], but that represents a significant asset to a huge array of applications, such as education and learning, in fact, the new teaching and learning paradigm called Education 4.0 [2].…”

Implementing Industry 4.0 through Cleaner Production and Social Stakeholders: Holistic and Sustainable Model

“…Although some studies question whether the evolution of industry occurred by natural technological evolution or revolutions [33,48,49], four industrial revolutions are usually cited.…”

Value analysis as a mechanism to reduce the complexity of the selection of the resources system for Agile/Virtual Enterprises in the context of Industry 4.0

“…Aggregate effort = ∑k i n (10) Then, for both cases, using the values from the 9 gives a vision of the effort reduction when the integration of VA is considered.…”

“…The main reason for this is due the fact that the performance of such SRS process will influence the performance of the A/V E, i.e., its operation cost, quality/value, time spent, and its agility to reconfigure. Moreover, the concept of Industry 4.0 (I4.0), namely with the digitalization, gives to the enterprises new opportunities to access new markets and supply chains [9], that means the fitness to candidate to any A/V E. In spite of few authors consider that I4.0 is still a vision of the future [10] or the research projects do not reach all the initial goals [11] the transformation is underway and the connectivity among enterprises is seen as important and necessary.…”