image: These are the results of analyzing scholarly journals, containing the term 'Fourth Industrial Revolution'. view more
Credit: UNIST
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, also referred to as Industry 4.0, has been widely discussed at various venues, such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos. However, its concept has from early times been somewhat blurred.
A research team, affiliated with UNIST has presented a study that contributes to clarify the concept and scope of Industry 4.0, using big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). This breakthrough has been carried out by Professor Chiehyeon Lim and Changhun Lee in the School of Management Engineering at UNIST.
In recognition of their exemplary work in identifying important research areas and application issues of Industry 4.0, the team has been awarded the minister prize from the Korean Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) at the '2018 Future Convergence Forum', held on November 21, 2018.
Their work has been also selected as the best paper among many other outstanding research projects, supported via the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) Convergence Research Policy Fellowship program.
In this work, the team identified the important research areas and application issues of Industry 4.0 by analyzing 686 scientific articles (all available data related to the topic in the Web of Science Core Collections as of September 8, 2018) and 3,907 news articles (all available data related to the topic in the LexisNexis Business & Industry News Database as of September 17, 2018) through text mining with unsupervised learning algorithms.
According to their findings, scientific articles were able to define the notion and scope of Industry 4.0, while news articles were able to grasp Industry 4.0 technologies, application industries, as well as help address various social and national challenges.
Based on the analytics outcomes and further qualitative studies, their work identifies key convergence R&D issues of Industry 4.0. The issues are described in the hierarchy of Industry 4.0: (1) Infrastructure development for connection, (2) Artificial intelligence development for data analytics, (3) System and process optimization, (4) Industrial innovation, and (5) Social advance from the perspective of 6Cs of Industry 4.0 (Connection, Collection, Communications, Computation, and Control for Creation). In addition, their study also classified 19 major research fields for each of the stages for the realization of Industry 4.0.
Using their findings, the research team also uncovered 28 'Major R&D themes of convergence for the realization of Industry 4.0'. These themes are, then, categorized into five stages and are to make significant contribution to promoting convergence R&D, related to Fourth Industrial Revolution.
"The concept of Fourth Industrial Revolution has from early times been somewhat blurred," says Professor Lim. "This work will contribute to clarify the concept and scope of Industry 4.0 and promote relevant convergence R&D work." He adds, "Our study also shows the possibility of collaboration between humans and AI for the advancement of knowledge."
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A detailed Korean report of this study, entitled 'Data-driven Understanding of Industry 4.0 through Text Mining' can be found in the November 2018 issue of Convergence Research Review (ISSN: 2465-8456).