Transdisciplinary System of Systems Development in the Trend to X4.0

Abstract

Since the announcement of Industry 4.0 in 2012, multiple variants of this industry paradigm have emerged and built on the common platform of Internet of Things. Traditional engineering driven industries such as aerospace and automotive are able to align with Industry 4.0 and operate on requirements of the Internet of Things platform. Process driven industries such as water treatment and food processing are more influenced by societal perspectives and evolve into Water 4.0 or Dairy 4.0. In essence, the main outcomes of these X4.0 (where X can be any one of Quality, Water or a combination of) paradigms are facilitating communications between socio-technical systems and accumulating large amount of data. As the X4.0 paradigms are researched, defined, developed and applied, many real examples in industries have demonstrated the lack of system of systems design consideration, e.g. the issue of training together with the use of digital twin to simulate operation scenarios and faults in maintenance may lag behind events triggered in the hostile real world environment. This paper examines, from a high level system of systems perspective, how transdisciplinary engineering can incorporate data quality on the often neglected system elements of people and process while adapting applications to operate within the X4.0 paradigms.