Sustainability is becoming a major strategic driver within the aviation industry, which has moved from providing primarily economic benefits to delivering the ‘triple bottom line’, including social and environmental impact as well as financial performance. Sustainable aviation is also being tracked by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Global Collation for Sustainable Aviation. Operations and Infrastructure is an important near-term opportunity to deliver sustainability benefits. Digital Technologies, Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) and Maintenance Repair and Overhaul (MRO) play a prominent role in implementing these benefits, with a particular focus on operational efficiencies. As part of this, the sustainable smart hangar of the future is a concept that is becoming more and more important in forming the future of the aviation industry. The Hangar of the Future is an excellent opportunity for innovation, combining the progress in manufacturing, materials, robotics and artificial intelligence technologies. Succeeding in developing a hangar with these characteristics will provide us with potential benefits ranging from reduced downtime and costs to improved safety and environmental impact. This work explores some of the key features related to the sustainable smart hangar of the future by discussing research that takes place in DARTeC’s (Digital Aviation Research and Technology Centre) hangar led by the IVHM Centre in Cranfield. Additionally, the paper touches on some longer-term aspirations.

This paper explores the implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies in Small Enterprises (SEs), focusing on the unique challenges they face. It presents four case studies demonstrating how low-cost, low-effort solutions can enhance efficiency and productivity in small companies. The solutions, developed in a local makerspace, address specific manufacturing challenges that lack affordable or existing off-the-shelf solutions. The paper highlights the value of iterative prototyping in implementing Industry 4.0 solutions and discusses how this approach can help SEs overcome adaptation challenges.

Digital Twins are perceived differently between and within industry and academia regarding applications and potentials. For this reason, a round table was formed based on the Digital Twin Workshop of the Design Conference 2022. One of the results of this round table is this contribution, which deals with a survey within the industry. The survey captured the understanding of the different roles in the creation and use of Digital Twins, the requirements and hurdles as well as the perception of methodological support. In addition, factors that influence the perception were identified.

Digital transformation increases the need for interdisciplinary collaboration along the product lifecycle. It is currently hindered by a low data consistency resulting from the use of heterogeneous systems and data models. Especially in work planning, where several data models are combined, this decreases efficiency. Systems Lifecycle management (SysLM) offers a solution to this remedy. However, a sudden switch to SysLM is not possible in brownfields. Thus, it is necessary to examine the challenges and opportunities to derive case-specific measures that enable its adoption in work planning.

Industry 4.0 is leading to technological advancement in manufacturing and causing changes in tasks performed by operators. This represents a potential trigger of humans' stress and workload. This paper aims to investigate work-related stress in an industrial environment through a real production case study through ECG, EDA, EMG, and respiratory band. From stress physiological indicators analysis, preliminary suggestions for the case study are provided to make the production system more human-centered, according to Industry 5.0. Further studies may test the effect of the recommended actions.

Industry 4.0 deals with a digital revolution, integrating technologies like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Digital Twin, and Robotics. This transformation unlocks opportunities in engineering, addressing sustainability challenges. Stakeholders use I4.0 technologies, including Industry 5.0, to measure sustainability indicators. This paper reviews I4.0 technologies for assessing sustainability, offering an SI framework in manufacturing and smart product design. Decision-makers can optimize environmental, social, and economic impacts in smart product design using this framework.

Design and manufacturing innovations are important competitive attributes in the premium marine sector. The adoption of an open innovation process has the potential to deliver behavioural and technological transformation. This pilot study illustrates an open innovation approach to explore the benefits of digital innovation when designing new products within the premium marine industry. The research demonstrates how an open innovation approach will flourish when focused on co-creation in collaboration with a network of cross-functional partners.

This paper explores and experimentally compares the effectiveness of robot-stopping approaches based on the speed and separation monitoring for improving fluency in collaborative robotics. In the compared approaches, a supervisory controller checks the distance between the bounding volumes enclosing human operator and robot and prevents potential collisions by determining the robot’s stop time and triggering a stop trajectory if necessary. The methods are tested on a Franka Emika robot with 7 degrees of freedom, involving 27 volunteer participants, who are asked to walk along assigned paths to cyclically intrude the robot workspace, while the manipulator is working. The experimental results show that scaling online the dynamic safety zones is beneficial for improving fluency of human-robot collaboration, showing significant statistical differences with respect to alternative approaches.

This paper investigates how interest groups in France and Germany communicate information about Industry 4.0 technologies and approaches. Specifically, this explanatory study employs cutting-edge big-data-type tools and machine-based automatic text processing to delve into the topics, arguments, and postulates related to Industry 4.0 strategies by trade unions and employers’ organisations. The goal is to determine which of these factors have been pivotal in shaping social dialogue in France and Germany. The findings reveal that social partners in both countries are involved in similar digitalisation-related initiatives and express predominantly favourable viewpoints regarding Industry 4.0 technologies. Key themes in the dialogues of both France and Germany centre around workers’ rights, working conditions, and skills training.

This research aims to unpack how digital technologies can facilitate the flourishing of circular business practices in small- and medium-sized enterprises by structuring a detailed going circular path that explains businesses’ evolution toward circularity. In doing so, it outlines how the observed organizations have adopted – or are adopting – circular economy principles thanks to business digitalization. Following an inductive approach based on a multiple case study methodology, we investigated 16 small- and medium-sized enterprises operating in industries that put considerable pressure on the environment (e.g., manufacturing, chemical, construction, fashion, food, and beverage). Our findings confirm how digital technologies, as well as Industry 4.0 structures, play a fundamental role in shaping, enabling, enhancing, and refining circular products and processes development. Accordingly, we outline a generalizable step-by-step process to pursue circular economy by employing digital technologies. The present study represents a practical handout for guiding companies through their going circular path.

As part of the digital transformation towards Industry 4.0, the tasks of staff on the shop floor are changing. Despite increasing automation, complex assembly steps still have to be carried out by humans, especially when it comes to complex products rich in variants, whose assembly cannpt be fully automated for various reasons. Due to increasing individualization and the steadily growing complexity of products, providing the right information at the right time and in the right place is becoming more important. In this context, the visualization of information via novel technologies such as augmented reality plays a crucial role towards an efficient and error-free production process. This paper compiles existing challenges when using augmented reality as a visualization form for an assistance system. On the one hand, the challenges found originate from a systematic literature review and are organized according to predefined categories. On the other hand, these challenges are complemented and compared through findings gained from expert interviews, which are conducted with employees of two European commercial vehicle manufacturers in the field of production. The analysis of the two methods highlights the need for further research.

Designers are experiencing greater mental demands given the complexity of design tools, necessitating the study of cognitive load in design. Researchers have identified task- and designer-related factors that affect cognitive load; however, these studies primarily use self-reported measures that could be inaccurate and incomplete. Little research has tested the accuracy and completeness of self-reported measures and we aim to explore this gap. Towards this aim, we seek to answer the question: How does cognitive load vary based on the different design representations used, and do these differences depend on the measure of cognitive load? From our results, we see that the design representations vary in the range of cognitive load experienced by designers when using them. Moreover, this role of the range of cognitive load variance was observed given our use of pupil diameter. These findings call for the use of a multi-modal approach for measuring cognitive load with the combined use of subjective (e.g., self-report) and objective measures (e.g., physiological measures), as well as the use of both retrospective (e.g., self-report) and concurrent measures (e.g., physiological measures).

The industry's interest in Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) technologies started from the beginning of their appearance in the research world. Over the years, scholars observed ups and downs, to which various factors contributed. In recent years these technologies, now known as eXtended Reality (XR), have returned to fascinate the industrial world, mainly because most of the related enabling technologies have improved to the point of pushing companies to re-invest in them. The introduction of approaches such as the digital twin one and the recent hype on the metaverse is also a push in this direction. A few questions arise: what are the benefits of such technologies in the industry today, and what are the unexplored possibilities? Starting from a systematic literature review and exploring the practical implications of integrating technologies in the industrial field, the paper tries to answer these questions. The paper is not intended as a technological forecast but as a stimulus for future research.

With the paradigm shift towards Industry 4.0 and digitalisation, manufacturing engineers face several unexplored challenges; in the products for which they are designing production, in the equipment they are designing to realise production systems and in the digitalisation impact on engineering processes. Today's manufacturing system design processes are still based on traditional engineering methods and have difficulties to cope with increased complexity. The aim of this systematic literature review is to explore drivers and barriers to implement digitalisation in engineering processes from a socio-technical perspective. The identified general barriers were cyber security, lack of competence, lack of standards, large investments and resistance to change. For the engineering processes the main drivers were increased product complexity, servitisation, data driven design and engineering productivity, with the main barriers culture, excess amount of data, integration of tools. cyber security and data quality. The study shows the complexity of the challenge, and that it is not only the technology that is the top barrier. Further research is recommended to develop approaches of successful engineering digitalisation implementations.

The increasing importance of software as an essential functional provider in products and processes requires that companies master the development capabilities to continiously and quickly deliver high-quality software features. DevOps (acronym for Development and Operations) is an essential approach to these capabilities, which has so far been used predominantly in software-driven companies. This paper investigates the conditions under which DevOps can also be used in the industrial context of series manufacturing in order to be able to steadily develop and provide software features used in these environments (e.g. for monitoring and maintenance of manufacturing machines). A concept for DevOps for manufacturing systems was developed based on current best practices and the specific situation in the industrial company. The concept was then implemented and validated with experts on the basis of initial development cycles, demonstrating the usefulness of DevOps for manufacturing systems.

Among additive manufacturing processes, wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) is one of the most promising methods for manufacturing complex near-net-shape parts, as it allows the layer-by-layer deposition of welded material at a high deposition rate. However, this technology is highly dependent on deposition conditions and thermomechanical phenomena during the process. Therefore, process simulation could be used to analyse the effects of different deposition parameters on the thermomechanical results to optimise the process. However, as the computing time required for this study may become prohibitive, a dedicated strategy is needed to reduce it while maintaining a good level of accuracy. In this study, only the thermal analysis of the process is investigated. An efficient metamodel based on B-spline entities is developed to emulate the thermal response of the WAAM process when building a mild steel four-layer wall structure. Thanks to B-spline entities, the temperature profile at different locations is approximated as a function of a subset of deposition parameters of WAAM process, and the results are compared with the simulated temperature profile resulting from a validation dataset.

Digitalization is one of the fundamental pillars of Industry 4.0. Within smart factories, Big Data Analytics systems play a key role in supporting the decision-making process of various stages of business processes. In this context, this research aims to identify solutions able to process large volumes of data from digital business processes with the final goal of adding value to the organisation. More specifically, the research deals with the implementation of a digital manufacturing tool able to digitize the workforce management process. The research has been applied in the case study of an Italian manufacturing company operating in the leather goods sector through the digitalization of the workforce management by a cloud-based platform. The implementation of the tool increases the efficiency of the production process, provides efficient management and integrates workforce data into one system. The implemented tool generates a large volume of data, the final goal is to make data user-friendly to support business decisions. Digitisation provides an exchange of information to support managers to make confident decisions.

Fourth industrial revolution called Industry 4.0 has radically transformed production systems in manufacturing companies by the integration of emerging technologies. However, manufacturers must overcome several barriers, such as the lack of qualified talent to develop and manage various high-technology systems. Assembly system design aims to define proper assembly line configurations with the optimal performances to overcome increased competitiveness in the market. Nowadays, assembly system design should consider industry 4.0 concepts integration beyond traditional aspects like system balancing and sequencing. In this paper, we introduce a project-based learning approach to teach engineering students assembly system design taking into account industry 4.0 dimension. This project is carried out in collaboration with an industrial partner to design and implement car doors assembly line. The project demonstrated students interest and prepared them better for industry 4.0 era.

Collaborative robots (“cobots”) have attracted growing attention in academia and industry over the last years. Due to in-built safety features and easy programming, they allow for close human-cobot collaboration and support e.g. flexible manufacturing. However, the lack of a common understanding what a cobot is along with its traditional focus on arm-based cobots complicates further research and industry adoption. Thus, this paper analyses the variety of definitions in literature incl. standards and practice examples to derive a consistent and holistic definition and taxonomy of what a collaborative robot is. Aside from contributing a structured overview of various forms of human-robot collaboration, this builds an important foundation for future research as it systematically differentiates different cobot types. Companies and other organisations will benefit by a better understanding of what type of cobot they need and how to ensure safe collaboration.