Trends in Adopting Industry 4.0 for Asset Life Cycle Management for Sustainability: A Keyword Co-Occurrence Network Review and Analysis

Abstract

With the potential of Industry 4.0 technologies to enable sustainable manufacturing, asset life cycle management (ALCM) has been gaining increasing attention in recent years. This study explores the evolution of Industry 4.0 technology applications to sustainable ALCM from 2002 to 2021. This study is based on keywords collected from 3896 ALCM-related scientific articles published in the Web of Science, IEEE Xplore and Engineering Village between 2002 and 2021. We conducted a review analysis of these keywords using a network science-based methodology, which unlike the tedious traditional literature review methods, gives the capability to analyze a huge number of scientific articles efficiently. We built keyword co-occurrence networks (KCNs) from the keywords and explored the network characteristics to uncover meaningful knowledge patterns, knowledge components, knowledge structure, and research trends in the body of literature at the intersection of ALCM and Industry 4.0. The network modeling and data analysis results identify the emerging Industry 4.0-related keywords in ALCM literature and indicate the recent explosion of connectivity among keywords. We found IoT, predictive maintenance and big data to be the top three most popular Industry 4.0-related keywords in ALCM literature. Furthermore, this study maps relevant ALCM keywords in contemporary literature to the nine pillars of Industry 4.0 to help the responsible manufacturing community identify research trends and emerging technologies for sustainability.