Digital Services for Industry 4.0: Assessing Collaborative Technology Readiness

摘要

Collaborative technologies, such as peer-to-peer (P2P) communication systems, information sharing technologies, and online team meeting facilities have long been available to support the daily operation of businesses. We investigate how collaborative technologies can adapt to further underpin emerging business paradigms, namely the "Industry 4.0" trend. Our purpose is to contribute to the understanding of what characteristics would maintain a collaborative technology current and ready to be part of the digital services available to support the fourth industrial revolution demands. To fulfil this purpose, we propose a taxonomic solution for assessment of collaborative technologies readiness for Industry 4.0; the analysis obtained using this classification scheme serves as an indicator to elicitate what is required to be addressed to meet Industry 4.0 goals. We also present details about the taxonomy development and validation using a benchmarking approach. Finally, we exemplify how our taxonomy can be applied to assess a collaborative technology.