The Industry 4.0 concept of a Digital Twin will bring many advantages for wind energy conversion systems, e.g., in condition monitoring, predictive maintenance and the optimisation of control or design parameters. A virtual replica is at the heart of a digital twin. To construct a virtual replica, appropriate modelling techniques must be selected for the turbine components. These models must be chosen with the intended use case of the digital twin in mind, finding a proper balance between the model fidelity and computational load. This review article presents an overview of the recent literature on modelling techniques for turbine aerodynamics, structure and drivetrain mechanics, the permanent magnet synchronous generator, the power electronic converter and the pitch and yaw systems. For each component, a balanced overview is given of models with varying model fidelity and computational load, ranging from simplified lumped parameter models to advanced numerical Finite Element Method (F... [more]

This study addresses the issue of energy optimization by investigating solutions for the reduction of energy consumption in the diagnostics and monitoring of technological processes. The implementation of advanced process control is identified as a key approach for achieving energy savings and improving product quality, process efficiency, and production flexibility. The goal of this research is to develop a cost-effective system with a minimal number of ultrasound sensors, thus reducing the energy consumption of the overall system. To accomplish this, a novel method for obtaining high-resolution reconstruction in transmission ultrasound tomography (t-UST) is proposed. The method involves utilizing a convolutional neural network to take low-resolution measurements as input and output high-resolution sinograms that are used for tomography image reconstruction. This approach allows for the construction of a super-resolution sinogram by utilizing information hidden in the low-resolution m... [more]

Wireless technologies are increasingly used in industrial applications. These technologies reduce cabling, which is costly and troublesome, and introduce several benefits for their application in terms of flexibility to modify the layout of the nodes and scaling of the number of connected devices. They may also introduce new functionalities since they ease the connections to mobile devices or parts. Although they have some drawbacks, they are increasingly accepted in industrial applications, especially for monitoring and supervision tasks. Recently, they are starting to be accepted even for time-critical tasks, for example, in closed-loop control systems involving slow dynamic processes. However, wireless technologies have been evolving very quickly during the last few years, since several relevant technologies are available in the market. For this reason, it may become difficult to select the best alternative. This perspective article intends to guide application designers to choose t... [more]

This article presents the most valuable and applicable open-source tools and communication technologies that may be employed to create models of production processes by applying the concept of Digital Twins. In recent years, many open-source technologies, including tools and protocols, have been developed to create virtual models of production systems. The authors present the evolution and role of the Digital Twin concept as one of the key technologies for implementing the Industry 4.0 paradigm in automation and control. Based on the presented structured review of valuable open-source software dedicated to various phases and tasks that should be realised while creating the whole Digital Twin system, it was demonstrated that the available solutions cover all aspects. However, the dispersion, specialisation, and lack of integration cause this software to usually not be the first choice to implement DT. Therefore, to successfully create full-fledged models of Digital Twins by proceeding w... [more]

Today’s customer no longer wants one-size-fits-all products but expects products and services to be as tailored as possible. Mass customization and personalization are becoming a trend in the digitalization strategy of enterprises and manufacturing in Industry 4.0. The purpose of the paper is to develop and validate a conceptual model for leveraging Industry 4.0 and digitalization to support product customization. We explored the implications and impacts of Industry 4.0 and digitalization on product customization processes and determine the importance of variables. We applied structural equation modeling (SEM) to test our hypotheses regarding the antecedents and consequences of digitalization and Industry 4.0. We estimated the process model using the partial least squares (PLS) method, and goodness of fit measures show acceptable values. The proposed model considers relationships between technology readiness, digitalization, internal and external integration, internal value chain, and... [more]

Industry 4.0 integrates a series of emerging technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cyber-physical systems (CPS), cloud computing, and big data, and aims to improve operational efficiency and accelerate productivity inside the industrial environment. This article provides a series of information about the required structure to adopt Industry 4.0 approaches and a brief review of related concepts to finally identify challenges and research opportunities to envision the adoption of so-called digital twins. We want to pay attention to upgrading older systems aiming to provide the well-known advantages of Industry 4.0 to such legacy systems as reducing production costs, increasing efficiency, acquiring better robustness of equipment, and reaching advanced process connectivity.

Industry 4.0 technologies are causing a paradigm shift in supply chain process management. The digital transformation of the supply chains provides enormous benefits to organizations by empowering collaboration among multiple internal and external organizations and systems. This study presents a narrative review explaining the existing knowledge on digital transformation in supply chain process management using text mining. It summarizes the existing literature to explain the current state of the art in supply chain digitalization. This comprehensive review identifies the most important topics and technologies and determines the future trends in this emerging field. We investigate the articles published in Web of Science and Scopus databases and use text mining techniques (clustering and topic modeling) on the article contents. Using VOS viewer, a bibliometric analysis of 395 articles with 12,700 references is analyzed. The contents of the articles are explored using text mining approa... [more]

Even though Industry 4.0 is primarily focused on the implementation of advanced digital technologies, this is not the only aspect that should be considered. One of the aspects that calls for attention is the ability to create a sustainable and agile industrial environment. In this sense, the role of project management is crucial for achieving business excellence in a new industrial paradigm. The main goal of this paper was to determine the impact of different levels of project management maturity on business excellence in the context of Industry 4.0. The research in the paper was made using a sample of 124 organizations, differing in industry type and size, and recognized through the business excellence awards or recognitions given by European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM). Using the Project Management Maturity Model (ProMMM), a significant connection was found between project management maturity and business excellence. Considering technology advances, these relationships w... [more]

The competitiveness of companies in emerging countries implies many European countries must transform their production systems to be more efficient. Indeed, the new context created by the COVID-19 pandemic increases the necessity of digital transformation and focuses attention on its limited uptake by manufacturing companies. In France, the Industry 4.0 concepts are already implemented in large companies. Despite the demonstration and validation of their benefits, SMEs are reluctant to move towards implementation. This problem of SME performance improvement increases with the current geopolitical situation in Europe (raw materials and gasoil cost). It is thus urgent and paramount to find a better solution for encouraging SMEs in their transformation. Taking note of the brakes on uptake of Industry 4.0 concepts in SMEs, the objectives of this paper are to find levers to accelerate implementation of Industry 4.0 concepts in SMEs, through the development and the deployment of a sustainabl... [more]

The production of food is highly complex due to the various chemo-physical and biological processes that must be controlled for transforming ingredients into final products. Further, production processes must be adapted to the variability of the ingredients, e.g., due to seasonal fluctuations of raw material quality. Digital twins are known from Industry 4.0 as a method to model, simulate, and optimize processes. In this vision paper, we describe the concept of a digital food twin. Due to the variability of the raw materials, such a digital twin has to take into account not only the processing steps but also the chemical, physical, or microbiological properties that change the food independently from the processing. We propose a hybrid modeling approach, which integrates the traditional approach of food process modeling and simulation of the bio-chemical and physical properties with a data-driven approach based on the application of machine learning. This work presents a conceptual fra... [more]

Supply chain management (SCM), which generally refers to horizontal integration management, has steadily become the core competitiveness of company rivalry and an essential approach to developing national comprehensive and national strength since the end of the 20th century due to the numerous needs arising from a competitive international economy. Manufacturers develop a community of interest by forming long-term strategic partnerships with suppliers and vendors throughout the supply chain. This paper defines supply chain management by reviewing the existing literature and discusses the current state of supply chain management research, as well as prospective research directions. Specifically, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of the influential studies of SCM in terms of various aspects, such as research areas, journals, countries/regions, institutions, authors and corresponding authors, most cited publications, and author keywords, based on the 8998 reviews and articles collected... [more]

Enterprises looking to be competitive are constantly looking for a continuous increase in productivity, quality, and level of services. With the development of the industry 4.0 concept, manufacturers are more confident about the new advantages of automation and systems integration. Lean management is a well-developed and empirically proven managerial strategy. Combining lean and industry 4.0 practices seems to be a necessary evolutionary step to further raise the level of operational excellence. This study applied the main path analysis method to explore the development trend of lean management in the academic field. First, this study adopted the Scopus database to collect relevant papers, then analyzed their overall development trajectory by using Main Path 437 software, and used the g-index and h-index to identify more influential journals. Next, this study clustered the papers with similar topics into several groups, and then used Wordle software to present the keywords of each grou... [more]

The incursion of disruptive technologies, such as the Internet of Things, information technologies, cloud computing, digitalization and artificial intelligence, into current production processes has led to a new global industrial revolution called Industry 4.0 or Manufacturing 4.0. This new revolution proposes digitization from one end of the value chain to the other by integrating physical assets into systems and networks linked to a series of technologies to create value. Industry 4.0 has far-reaching implications for production systems and engineering education, especially in the training of mechatronic engineers. In order to face the new challenges of the transition from manufacturing 3.0 to Industry 4.0 and 5.0, it is necessary to implement innovative educational models that allow the systematic training of engineers. The competency-based education model has ideal characteristics to help mechatronic engineers, especially in the development of specific competencies. This article pr... [more]

The existing research and practices have shown that the coordinated implementation of lean-green manufacturing can have a positive impact on the economic and environmental benefits, which is an effective means to ensure the environmental protection of the production process of manufacturing without damaging their profitability. Within the field of lean-green research, there is still a lack of research to analyze the driving factors for the collaborative implementation of integrated lean and green integration. Although, some scholars and researchers have studied lean and green integration paradigms, their research has mostly focused on lean-green integration practices and their impact on environmental performance and their respective operations. In the context of Industry 4.0, this article investigates the driving forces behind the collaborative integration implementation of a lean-green manufacturing system from the viewpoint of stakeholders. Specifically addressing the issues of corre... [more]

The energy consumption of production processes is increasingly becoming a concern for the industry, driven by the high cost of electricity, the growing concern for the environment and the greenhouse emissions. It is necessary to develop and improve energy efficiency systems, to reduce the ecological footprint and production costs. Thus, in this work, a system is developed capable of extracting and evaluating useful data regarding production metrics and outputs. With the extracted data, machine learning-based models were created to predict the expected energy consumption of an automotive spot welding, proving a clear insight into how the input values can contribute to the energy consumption of each product or machine, but also correlate the real values to the ideal ones and use this information to determine if some process is not working as intended. The method is demonstrated in real-world scenarios with robotic cells that meet Volkswagen and Ford standards. The results are promising,... [more]

Technological advances have shown an accentuated growth trend, which is directly proportional to the quality of life in today’s society. As a result, the business market is becoming increasingly competitive and customers are becoming more demanding, forcing companies to look for new tools and adopt new work methodologies to improve their flexibility, effectiveness and efficiency, ensuring a better response to market needs. In this context, the tools for tracking objects, totally or partially automatic, are considered essential technologies to all kinds of analysis and the treatment of business data, providing several benefits to companies, including waste reduction, identification of bottlenecks, cost reduction, improvement of product quality and the entire flow of business information. A case study of an industrial company specializing in machining, polishing and galvanoplasty of metallic alloys, small size pieces to be incorporated in luxury fashion accessories, is presented. Derived... [more]

The concern of sustainable supplier selection has been raised recently in organizations’ decision making to enhance their competitiveness. Many tools have been developed to support supplier evaluation, yet the factors of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) have been ignored despite their impact on sustainable performance. Hence, this paper aims to include the technology of I4.0 as the criteria to evaluate the competence of suppliers in sustainability. Multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) has been used to build decision-making systems; thus, this study employed two advanced methods of MCDM, the ordinal priority approach (OPA) and measurement of alternatives and ranking according to compromise solution (MARCOS) in a fuzzy environment. To test the feasibility of the proposal, five manufacturers of Vietnam’s leather and footwear industry were hypothetically assigned. Firstly, the evaluation criteria were weighted by OPA. Then, the ranking of alternatives was determined by fuzzy MARCOS. The results sho... [more]

sp. is a microorganism cultured for producing docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Genome-scale metabolic modeling (GEM) is a promising technique for describing gen-protein-reactions in cells, but with still limited industrial application due to its complexity and high computation requirements. In this work, we simplified GEM results regarding the relationship between the specific oxygen uptake rate (−rO2), the specific growth rate (µ), and the rate of lipid synthesis (rL) using an evolutionary algorithm for developing a model that can be used by a soft sensor for fermentation monitoring. The soft sensor estimated the concentration of active biomass (X), glutamate (N), lipids (L), and DHA in a Schizochytrium sp. fermentation using the dissolved oxygen tension (DO) and the oxygen mass transfer coefficient (kLa) as online input variables. The soft sensor model described the biomass concentration response of four reported experiments characterized by different kLa values. The average range normali... [more]

Industry 4.0 is the latest technological age, in which recent technological developments are being integrated within industrial systems. Consequently, maintenance management of current industrial manufacturing systems is affected by the emergence of the technologies and features of Industry 4.0. This study aimed to conduct a comprehensive literature review to understand how Industry 4.0 technologies and features affect the various functions of maintenance management systems. The reviewing process was initiated by examining the most recent related literature in three different databases. In total, 54 articles were classified into three research categories. Then, the integration of the main functions and components of the adopted maintenance management model and the Industry 4.0 features and technologies were aligned, focusing on the driving force of predictive maintenance. The analysis focused mainly on the technical aspects of the integration process, including integration concepts and... [more]

Supply chain management is one of the most prominent areas that needs to incorporate sustainability to achieve responsible consumption and production (SDG 11).It has been identified that there are limited studies that have presented the significance of different Industry 4.0 technologies from the perspective of sustainable SCM. The purpose of this study is to discuss the role of Industry 4.0 technologies in the context of sustainable SCM, as well as to identify important areas for future research. The PRISM framework is followed to discuss the role and significance of sustainable SCM and the integration of Industry 4.0-enabling technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and digital twin for sustainable SCM. The findings of the study reveal that there are limited empirical studies for developing countries and the majority are emphasized in case studies. Additionally, a few studies have focused on operational as... [more]

This paper explains the project’s objectives, identifies the key stakeholders, defines the project manager’s authority and provides a preliminary breakdown of roles and responsibilities. For the project’s future, it acts as a source of authority. This paper’s objective is to record the justifications for starting the project, its goals, limitations, solution instructions and the names of the principal stakeholders. This manuscript is meant to be used as a “Project Management Plan Light” for small and medium-sized projects when it would be uneconomical to prepare an entire collection of documents that make up a project management plan. A global media cloud will be provided and managed by the ABC cloud company inside of a consumer’s current premises. In this paper, the authors explain the end-to-end delivery of cloud and compute services. The article mainly focuses on the delivery of virtual machines (VMs), graphics processing unit (GPUs), cloud storage, transcoding, packaging, 24/7 cust... [more]

The article presents the problems connected with the performance evaluation of a flexible production system in the context of designing and integrating production and logistics subsystems. The goal of the performed analysis was to determine the parameters that have the most significant influence on the productivity of the whole system. The possibilities of using automated machine tools, automatic transport vehicles, as well as automated storage systems were pointed out. Moreover, the exemplary models are described, and the framework of simulation research related to the conceptual design of new production systems are indicated. In order to evaluate the system’s productivity, the use of Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) metrics was proposed, which is typically used for stationary resources such as machines. This paper aims to prove the hypothesis that the OEE metric can also be used for transport facilities such as Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). The developed models include the para... [more]

Modern industrial units collect large amounts of process data based on which advanced process monitoring algorithms continuously assess the status of operations. As an integral part of the development of such algorithms, a reference dataset representative of normal operating conditions is required to evaluate the stability of the process and, after confirming that it is stable, to calibrate a monitoring procedure, i.e., estimate the reference model and set the control limits for the monitoring statistics. The basic assumption is that all relevant “common causes” of variation appear well represented in this reference dataset (using the terminology adopted by the founding father of process monitoring, Walter A. Shewhart). Otherwise, false alarms will inevitably occur during the implementation of the monitoring scheme. However, we argue and demonstrate in this article, that this assumption is often not met in modern industrial systems. Therefore, we introduce a new approach based on the r... [more]

Sensors and process control systems are essential for process automation and optimization. Many sectors have adapted to the Industry 4.0 paradigm, but copper smelters remain hesitant to implement these technologies without appropriate justification, as many critical functions remain subject to ground operator experience. Recent experiments and industrial trials using radiometric optoelectronic data acquisition, coupled with advanced quantitative methods and expert systems, have successfully distinguished between mineral species in reactive vessels with high classification rates. These experiments demonstrate the increasing potential for the online monitoring of the state of a charge in pyrometallurgical furnaces, allowing data-driven adjustments to critical operational parameters. However, the justification to implement an innovative control system requires a quantitative framework that is conducive to multiphase engineering projects. This paper presents a unified quantitative framewor... [more]

Fruits and vegetables are highly nutritious agricultural produce with tremendous human health benefits. They are also highly perishable and as such are easily susceptible to spoilage, leading to a reduction in quality attributes and induced food loss. Cold chain technologies have over the years been employed to reduce the quality loss of fruits and vegetables from farm to fork. However, a high amount of losses (≈50%) still occur during the packaging, pre-cooling, transportation, and storage of these fresh agricultural produce. This study highlights the current state-of-the-art of various advanced tools employed to reducing the quality loss of fruits and vegetables during the packaging, storage, and transportation cold chain operations, including the application of imaging technology, spectroscopy, multi-sensors, electronic nose, radio frequency identification, printed sensors, acoustic impulse response, and mathematical models. It is shown that computer vision, hyperspectral imaging, m... [more]