Industry 4.0 Development Multi-Criteria Assessment: An Integrated Fuzzy DEMATEL, ANP and VIKOR Methodology

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) includes an important regeneration of production and management systems within manufacturing, where the majority of the procedures will be entirely or partially automated. However, there are insufficient research studies related to I4.0 development assessment based on the various requirement factors to enable countries to measure their own conditions and to make future national strategies and roadmaps for their activities in this field. Thus, this paper develops a comprehensive framework to assess the countries' readiness level in I4.0 development. The research is conducted in several steps. First, the main required clusters and their criteria of I4.0 development assessment such as technological, social, economic, political and environmental clusters are determined. Second, the importance of the clusters and their criteria are specified using the Fuzzy DEMATLE and Fuzzy ANP techniques. Third, the countries are ranked using the VIKOR technique. In this study, the conditions of I4.0 development for South Korea, the United States, China, Iran, Japan, and Germany are assessed based on the proposed framework. The ranking results show the United States, Germany, and Japan got ranked first to third, based on the obtained VIKOR index, 0.000, 0.528, and 0.559, respectively. The framework is verified using sensitivity analysis and validated based on the countries' existing plans. The evaluation results are rescannable. The result shows that the United States, Germany, Japan, and South Korea got high scores especially in the technological cluster and also some challenges in the criteria related to the social and cultural clusters. On the other hand, China and Iran got the highest score in the labor force criterion of the social cluster (0.023) and the intercultural understanding criterion of the cultural cluster (0.006), respectively, however, they need to strengthen the technological cluster “to be hopeful of having” an active role in future global marketing.