Paper on Industry 4.0 published in IEEE Engineering Management Review
Professor Netland's paper "Demystifying Industry 4.0: Navigating Automation and Augmentation," is now available under the "Early Access" area on IEEE Xplore.
The article reviews the progress toward automatic lights-out factories and presents a simple matrix to help demystify Industry 4.0 and how to pursue it. A framework spanning out automation versus augmentation on a horizontal axis and point solutions versus system solutions on a vertical axis, as shown below, can help explain Industry 4.0.
As illustrated in its upper left corner, Industry 4.0 is—in its original form—a vision for full system automation. However, in reality, Industry 4.0 is often seen as a mixed bag of technologies in search of use cases. The presented framework can serve as a mapping tool for tracking what types of technologies have been tested and which ones to prioritize next.
For a summary of the paper, please check out professor Netland's blog: "Industry. 40 explained", external page click here.
Read the article: Netland, T. (2025) "Demystifying Industry 4.0: Navigating Automation and Augmentation," in IEEE Engineering Management Review, external page doi