Abstract
Ten years after the first appearance of the term “Industry 4.0” in the Hannover fair, the advancements of this paradigm are manifold. Among the technologies that constitute Industry 4.0, i.e., Industrial Internet of Things, cloud computing, additive manufacturing, vertical and horizontal integration, big data and analytics, cyber-physical systems, simulation, augmented reality and cyber security, a variety of applications have been developed in relation to products, factories, and cities. From an industrial point of view, the changes at the shop floor and supply chain level will affect the way the supply chain and operations management activities will be conducted. Mapping the path of this growth highlights today’s opportunities and challenges related to Industry 4.0 and helps researchers and practitioners in taking chances and dealing with issues. Hence, the aim of this work is to identify the main trends of evolution of this paradigm by means of a review of literature on the topic. To achieve such a result, this research adopts a dynamic and quantitative bibliometric method including works citations, keywords co-occurrence networks, and keywords burst detection. The aim is to study and analyze the main contributions to this research area and identify prevalent topics and trends over time. The analysis performed on citations traces the backbone of contributions to the topic, highlighted within the main path. Keywords co-occurrence networks depict the prevalent issues addressed, tools implemented, and application areas. The burst detection completes the analysis by identifying the trends and most recent research areas characterizing research on Industry 4.0.
