Digital technologies review for manufacturing processes

Abstract

It is apparent the industrial processes transformations caused by industry 4.0 are in advance in some countries like China, Japan, Germany and United States. But, in return, the developing countries, as the emergent Brazil, seem like to have a long way to achieve digital era. Considering manufacturing processes as the starting point the rise of industry 4.0, this research aims to show a review about the most important technologies used in smart manufacturing, including the main challenges to implement it at Brazil. The papers were collected from Web of Science (WoS), comprising 114 articles and 2 books to underpin this study. This exploratory research resulted in the presentation of some challenges faced by Brazilian industry to join the new industrial era, such as poor technological infrastructure, besides lack of investment in technologies and training of qualified people. Even though the primary motivation of this research was to present a panorama of smart manufacturing for Brazil, this study results contributes to the most of emergent countries, bringing together general concepts and addressing practical applications developed by several researchers from the international academic community.