Industry 4.0

Track Chair

Prof. Dr. Alptekin Erkollar, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Introduction

Industry 4.0, referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, has exponentially grown to start from the manufacturing sector and is sweeping across industries, changing everything from production, business models, customer relations, research projects, regional, national and global innovation strategies. The driving force behind this development is the rapidly increasing digitization of economy and society and a growing concern with customer centricity and user-driven innovation. Industry 4.0 depends on some technological developments, one of them being information and communication technologies, which are used to digitize information and integrate systems at all stages of product development and service life, both inside an organization and cross-organizational. It depends on decentralization, virtualization, interoperability, real-time capability, and service orientation. Numerous industries around the world have set onto industry 4.0 in an attempt to boost competitiveness and product quality. Technology trends forming the building blocks for Industry 4.0 are big data and analytics, augmented reality, simulation, additive manufacturing, the cloud, cybersecurity, the (industrial) internet of things, horizontal and vertical system integration, and autonomous robots. These Technologies will lead to higher efficiencies and change traditional relationships among suppliers, producers, and customers, as well as between human and machine.

In this track, we will discuss issues related to the potential of Industry 4.0 for manufacturing. We also would like to attract papers that consider the impact of industry 4.0 on other industries, such as finance, human resources, marketing or education.

Prof. Erkollar is a Professor for management information Systems at Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland.

Dr. Erkollar's research expertise includes management information systems, industry 4.0 and the factory of the future, production management, technology management, modeling of business systems and simulation. He is an author/editor of several books, more than 200 refereed papers and an editorial board member of 13 international journals. His recently edited book ‘Enterprise and Business Management - Industry 4.0’ is the 2019 volume of the international EBM Series. Dr. Erkollar is the editor of operations research book to be published in 2019 with contributions of more than 15 universities.