Industry 4.0 road mapping: A fuzzy linguistic approach

The industry 4.0 transition is becoming crucial for organizations. The literature reviewed showed that whilst there are many studies on industry 4.0 assessment that help organizations evaluate their current state, limited studies exist for road-mapping activities. The main aim of this study is to construct a model that leads organizations to their fourth industrial revolution transition. Companies, especially small and medium-sized ones (SMEs), need clear, agile, and efficient road maps because of their limited resources. Lack of a procedure that guides organizations in the right way is the motivation of this study. A linguistic fuzzy inference system is used in this study. Concepts are determined, and relations between concepts with if-then rules have been constructed according to the expert opinion. MATLAB R2015a is used for the inference system. An exemplary case is considered, and the results show that the inference system can provide company-specific roadmaps. To which extend an industry 4.0 concept should be taken into account for a company can be seen with the proposed method. The proposed method showed that specific and agile roadmaps could be obtained. Because of the dependency of expert opinion for the fuzzy rule base, different methods for obtaining rules and relations may be a future research direction.