Towards Industry X.0: A Consolidated Framework for Evaluating the Technological Readiness Levels of the Automotive Industry

Abstract

The world is being orchestrated by dramatic changes caused by technological and innovative disruptions. Accordingly, Industry X.0 terminology was coined because the revolutionary numbers could not represent this industrial disruption. Coping with these technological disruptions is essential for an organization’s sustainability and resilience. Therefore, defining the technological gaps, as well as mapping the potential innovative disruptions for industrial systems, becomes compulsory. Technology Readiness Levels is a standardized method widely adopted to evaluate the maturity of a technology, using a scale from 1 (concept) to 9 (commercialized solution). This framework helps stakeholders to benchmark different industrial systems from a technology innovation perspective. However, TRL sometimes fails to capture the maturity of breakthrough innovations and lacks quantification. In this paper, a comprehensive framework for assessing technological readiness levels is proposed. The automotive industry was selected as one of the top technology-related industries to validate this framework. This framework maps the technological readiness levels of the following three main industry components: product, engineering, and operations. A tailored Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model has been employed as a benchmarking approach to evaluate the technological readiness gaps and map the technological footprint position of a selected automotive company across the best practices in the automotive industry.