Conceptualizing Industry 4.0 for Greek Manufacturing Sector

Abstract

The so-called “fourth industrial revolution” or Industry 4.0 aims to transform the current EU industries into synchronous global market leaders, by incorporating into their production and functional framework the contemporary digital opportunities. Several EU countries have already launched the initiatives to adopt the next generation technologies into their industries. Recently, Greece recognized the necessity to upgrade its industrial environment with features such as “flexible production lines”, “smart IoT solutions”, “collaborative robotics”, “inter-operable services”, “adaptable industrial processes” etc., by identifying them as the key technological instruments that will bring its industry into the forefront of EU production sector. This will allow to state to overcome the so far major socio-economic and financial barriers that dragged the country back from its extrovert market potential. To this end, the paper at hand aims to propose a comprehensive transition to Industry 4.0 strategy by introducing a conceptual implementation approach that will pose the steps to be followed for the Greek stakeholders in order to pass from the era of computational automation, through the digital transformation, into the era of the ubiquitous cyber-physical systems (CPS), necessitated from the next generation industrial environments.