Quo Vadis Industry 4.0: An Overview Based on Scientific Publications Analytics

The introduction of Industry 4.0 to modernize the existing industrial manufacturing systems has created a wave of disruption all over the world, that changed not only the industry paradigm, but also the research directions in the intelligent manufacturing systems field. After five years since its presentation, similar initiatives have fostered in several countries worldwide to promote the adoption of Industry 4.0 principles. This paper aims to analyze and discuss the current state of adoption of this initiative and to verify the way it changed the research directions, particularly at the level of applying artificial intelligence and ICT technologies in the cyber-physical systems context. For this purpose, an analytical study of the scientific publications related to Industry 4.0 domain has been performed, considering a dataset of scientific publications retrieved from the IEEE Xplore database. This dataset considers two distinct time periods, separated by the introduction of Industry 4.0 as the digitalization threshold: before digital era (B.D.) and after digital era (A.D.).