A Conceptual Definition and Future Directions of Urban Smart Factory for Sustainable Manufacturing

Abstract

Today, megatrends such as individualization, climate change, emissions, energy, and resource scarcity, urbanization, and human well-being, impact almost every aspect of people’s lives. Transformative impacts on many sectors are inevitable, and manufacturing is not an exception. Many studies have investigated solutions that focus on diverse directions, with urban production being the focus of many research efforts and recent studies concentrating on Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing technologies. This study investigated the integration of smart factory technologies with urban manufacturing as a solution for the aforementioned megatrends. A literature review on related fields, mass personalization, sustainable manufacturing, urban factory, and smart factory was conducted to analyze the benefits, challenges, and correlations. In addition, applications of smart factory technologies in urban production with several case studies are summarized from the literature review. The integration of smart factory technologies and urban manufacturing is proposed as the urban smart factory which has three major characteristics, human-centric, sustainable, and resilient. To the best of the author’s knowledge, no such definition has been proposed before. Practitioners could use the conceptual definition of an urban smart factory presented in this study as a reference model for enhancement of urban production while academics could benefit from the mentioned future research directions.

Industrial revolution and environmental sustainability: an analytical interpretation of research constituents in Industry 4.0

“…Industry 4.0 allows focusing on essential functional pillars like technological progress, integration and collaboration and process optimization. These megatrends include the cloud, big data and cyber security (Sajadieh et al , 2022). They are expected to play a big part in making smart manufacturing a reality (Bhatia and Kumar, 2022).…”

Collaborative approaches in sustainable and resilient manufacturing

“…• Reduce costs : - Industrial symbiosis (Gao et al, 2020 ; Chen & Liu, 2021 ). • Increase resilience : - Urban smart manufacturing and resilience (Sajadieh et al, 2022 ). • Increase customer involvement : - Stigmergic mass customization, co-creation, & co-design (Ogunsakin et al, 2021 ; Rayna et al, 2015 ; Turner et al, 2019 ).…”

“… • Increase customer involvement : - Stigmergic mass customization, co-creation, & co-design (Ogunsakin et al, 2021 ; Rayna et al, 2015 ; Turner et al, 2019 ). - Urban smart manufacturing and user involvement (Sajadieh et al, 2022 ). • Implement social manufacturing : - Social manufacturing model (Jiang et al, 2016 ).…”

Industry 4.0 based sustainable manufacturing model for apparel industry in Sri Lanka

“…Sustainable Manufacturing (SM) involves the transformation of resources into economically valuable goods by operating socially and environmentally responsible processes (Sartal, et al, 2020). Thus, SM requires to consider the implications of social, economic, and environmental dimensions associated with the manufacturing stages (Sajadieh, et al, 2022). The base of the social dimension of sustainability is ensuring safety and equity to the employees, stakeholders and community (Sangwan and Bhatia, 2020).…”

“…Further, Sartal, et al (2020) proved that the ICT based infrastructure, technological advances, human-machine and machine-to-machine interaction of I4.0 enables SM. According to previous studies (Erboz, 2017;Ghobakhloo, 2018;Javaid, et al, 2022;Mehnen, et al, 2021;Menon, et al, 2018;Psarommatis, et al, 2022;Rehman and Ejaz, 2020;Rüßmann, et al, 2015;Sajadieh, et al, 2022;Stock and Seliger, 2016;Tay, et al, 2018), the technology pillars of I4.0 facilitates manufacturing process with numerous opportunities covering all three dimensions of SM; social, economic and environmental. Those opportunities derived from the above-mentioned studies were captured under each dimension of SM (refer Table 1).…”