How Digital Shadows, New Forms of Human-Machine Collaboration, and Data-Driven Business Models Are Driving the Future of Industry 4.0: A Delphi Study

Abstract

AbstractTransferring the idea of the Internet to the manufacturing landscape—the Internet of Production (IoP)—fundamentally changes our understanding of how products are developed, produced, and utilized. A key concept of the IoP is digital shadows that connect data, products, and equipment and are shared in cross-organizational data spaces. These developments are also core ideas driving the evolution of the current Industry 4.0 paradigm into its next generation (“Industry 4.U”) and have far-reaching implications that go beyond mere technical issues. From a company-internal perspective, managers and workers need to deal with new forms of collaboration and cooperation between humans, robots, smart machines, and algorithms. From a company-external (network) perspective, data-based value creation and capture in platform-based ecosystems change the logic of many manufacturing business models. These changes have been reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which acted as a catalyst for many transformation processes. Given the high uncertainty in the likelihood of occurrence and of the technical, economic, and societal impacts of these concepts, we conducted a technology foresight study in the form of a real-time Delphi analysis to derive reliable future scenarios featuring the next generation of manufacturing systems. This chapter introduces the conceptual and technical background of this study, defines important terms and frameworks, and provides an overview of the Delphi projections that are presented and analyzed in greater detail in the remaining chapters of this book.[Abstract generated by machine intelligence with GPT-3. No human intelligence applied.]