Industry 4.0: Sustainability and Design Principles

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is the framework upon which modern industries, businesses, and service sectors are designed. The potentials of the I4.0 supporting faster communication between Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Machine-to-People (M2P), increase system intelligence with better agility and flexibility making it receive wide acclaim and adoption across the public and private sectors. Leveraging on its potentials, I4.0 offers increased value creation and productivity benefits in terms of better resource management, optimized systems and processes, and smarter supply value chains. The advancement of I4.0 and its related technologies has been linked to their sustainability potentials and design considerations. This work discusses the sustainability of I4.0 in light of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); while presenting the principle design considerations of I4.0 systems, highlighting their properties and importance for the attainment of the design goals. To attain design goals, I4.0 systems should be interoperable, easily virtualized, decentralized, be capable of real-time processing, be service oriented and be appropriately modular for increased reconfigurability and reusability. These demands on the development of I4.0 systems has increased the complexity of the challenges to be concerning security and privacy of networks and data, system reliability, communication, etc. Therefore, future I4.0 systems will have to be developed based on sustainable design principles in order to achieve the SDGs.