ABSTRACT
Since the announcement of Industry 4.0 in 2012, multiple variants of this industry paradigm have emerged and built on the common platform of Internet of Things. Engineering-driven industries such as aerospace and automotive and process-driven industries such as water treatment and food processing are influenced similarly trying to adapt to the so-called fourth generation (4.0) paradigm. In essence, the main outcomes of these X4.0 adaptations (where X can be any one of Quality, Water, Procurement, Gas or a combination of industries) are the facilitation of communications between socio-technical systems and the accumulation large amount of data. As the X4.0 paradigms are researched, defined, developed and applied, many real-world examples in a variety of industries have demonstrated a lack of system of systems design consideration. Participants are inhibited from working seamlessly and lag behind events triggered in the hostile real-world internet environment. This paper examines, from a high-level system of systems perspective, how transdisciplinary engineering can create a model of evolutionary X4.0 and how intelligent manufacturing can be developed towards X4.0 within the transdisciplinary modelling framework.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).