Industry 4.0: a tertiary literature review

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has become one of the most discussed subjects in academic and professional fields. The number of articles published is large and continues to increase, introducing new issues, concepts, methods, and technologies. Many review articles deal with specific issues and not always with the necessary rigor, making a more general understanding of the subject difficult. Motivated by the large volume of literature, this study makes a tertiary review of Industry 4.0 (i4.0), identifying the main concepts, methods, and technologies. The study is guided by three research questions: What are the literature reviews on i4.0? What are the research questions of these reviews? What are the main results of i4.0 reviews? The reviewed articles are systematic review articles indexed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. This study presents a descriptive analysis of the review articles (46 articles) and a second descriptive analysis of the references cited in them (1542 articles). In content analysis, we grouped the articles into three classes: conceptual articles, articles on enabling technologies, and articles that address operations management in i4.0. The reviewed articles show the multidisciplinary nature of the topic and the still relative scarcity of studies on its application in companies.