Sustainability and Industry 4.0: Obstacles and Opportunities

The fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 is widely expected to result in fundamental advances in all aspects of manufacturing, including transformation of manufacturing toward sustainability. This paper focuses on the opportunities that Industry 4.0 is expected to provide for improving sustainability and the obstacles in realizing these benefits. We introduce the concept of sustainability and the requirements for a system to be sustainable. This includes economic feasibility, social desirability and ecological viability for current and future generations. We provide a tutorial overview of methods and concepts that are relevant to assessing and designing sustainable systems. These include methods for considering direct and indirect impacts such as carbon footprint analysis and life cycle assessment; approaches for respecting nature’s capacity such as planetary boundaries and ecosystem services; and methods for considering social equity. We summarize the insight that such methods can provide about the sustainability of Industry 4.0. While Industry 4.0 is likely to improve the energy and material efficiency of industrial activities, the wider impact of these innovations is less clear. Some previous innovations have resulted in unintended harm due to the shifting of impacts in space, time, and across disciplines. We describe approaches from sustainable engineering to reduce the chance of such unintended harm from Industry 4.0. One such approach involves the integrated design and control of networks of industrial and ecological systems. Such a system seeks mutually beneficial synergies that can be economically, socially, and ecologically superior to traditional techno-centric designs. We describe how advances in process control, data science, smart sensors, etc. are needed for the practical realization of such win-win benefits.