A Survey on the Deployment of Smart Factories in the Post-COVID-19 Era: The Role of 5G, Deployment Options, Benefits, and Business Models

Introduction

Each one of the last 3 centuries brought an industrial revolution, capable to transform the whole economic landscape, in terms of: (a) jobs created and abolished, (b) technologies and processes massively introduced and (c) an overall societal change. In the 21^st century, business environment has entered in new era, that many researchers and professionals claim to be the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the so-called “Industry 4.0”. Industry 4.0 aim to deliver “fundamental improvements to the industrial process involved in manufacturing, engineering, material usage and supply chain and life cycle management” (Kagermann et al., 2013) by enabling the communication between people, machines and resources. This will be achieved by integrating physical, machinery and devices with networked sensors and software, creating complex but accurate systems capable to predict, plan and control societal and business outcomes.

The whole idea is based on embedding networks and computers to physical process, in order: to support unique identification, to collect, store and analyze data and finally to create networks from physical processes to computation (e.g. structured information) and vice versa (e.g. processes reengineering) (E. A. Lee, 2008). This side of Industry 4.0 is the so-called Cyber Physical System (CPS) and it aim to the fusion of physical and virtual world (Kagermann, 2014). Another side is the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) into various manufacturing and business processes / operations in order to allow “things” such as mobile devices, sensors, RFID and actuators to interact and cooperate to reach common goals (Giusto, Iera, Morabito, & Atzori, 2016).

Industry 4.0’s main goal at the time is to achieve the integration between physical, machinery and devices (CPS) with networked sensors and software (IoT), creating complex but accurate systems capable to predict, plan and control business outcomes (Industrial Internet Consortium, 2013). By incorporating both business and societal aspects to the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s outcomes the boundaries of expected change elevate to business sector that lie out from manufacturing (such as transports and logistics), while in societal level aspects of everyday life (such as cultural and tourism activities) will embed technological elements and change how both services providers and consumers think and act (Kargas & Varoutas, 2020). By accepting so, authors recognize that gradually Industry 4.0 can and will find apply to any business sector and industry where internet and embedded systems can serve as a backbone to integrate physical objects, human actors, intelligent machines, production lines and processes in order to develop a new agile, networked and intelligent value chain (Schumacher, Erol, & Sihn, 2016).

Taking into consideration one of the first scenarios (Wahlster, 2013) about how Industry 4.0 will transform business environment, reader can see how multiple users / consumers personal choices are transformed to an optimized process for the supply chain or the packaging. Sensors, actuators and microprocessors can be used to transform objects to smart objects. These objects are not only digital devices, but common, everyday objects augmented with the above-mentioned digital technology. The IoT connects smart objects that have common goals with an online database which tracks and collects data from real world through Cloud Computing technologies. These data can be used in various ways including (indicative): (a) to change smart objects’ behavior (new goal to serve), (b) redesign a product / service according to users measured needs / desires in a decentralized procedure that can be dynamically reconfigured when needed (Löffler & Tschiesner, 2013), (c) creating the framework for bespoke design focusing on values and experiences of users instead of typical production optimization.