A Survey on Information and Communication Technologies for Industry 4.0: State-of-the-Art, Taxonomies, Perspectives, and Challenges

A new industrial revolution is undergoing, based on a number of technological paradigms. The will to foster and guide this phenomenon has been summarized in the expression “Industry 4.0” (I4.0). Initiatives under this term share the vision that many key technologies underlying Cyber-Physical Systems and Big Data Analytics are converging to a new distributed, highly automated, and highly dynamic production network, and that this process needs regulatory and cultural advancements to effectively and timely develop. In this work, we focus on the technological aspect only, highlighting the unprecedented complexity of I4.0 emerging from the scientific literature. While previous works have focused on one or up to four related enablers, we consider ten technological enablers, including besides the most cited Big Data, Internet of Things, and Cloud Computing, also others more rarely considered as Fog and Mobile Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Robotics, down to the often overlooked, very recent, or taken for granted Open-Source Software, Blockchain, and the Internet. For each we explore the main characteristics in relation to I4.0 and its interdependencies with other enablers. Finally we provide a detailed analysis of challenges in leveraging each of the enablers in I4.0, evidencing possible roadblocks to be overcome and pointing at possible future directions of research. Our goal is to provide a reference for the experts in some of the technological fields involved, for a reconnaissance of integration and hybridization possibilities with other fields in the endeavor of I4.0, as well as for the laymen, for a high-level grasp of the variety (and often deep history) of the scientific research backing I4.0.