Prioritizing the Factors Affecting the Application of Industry 4.0 Technology in Electrical Appliance Manufacturing using a Fuzzy Analytical Network Process Approach

Abstract

The fourth industrial revolution is a technological advancement that is posing new challenges in manufacturing and services. Industries must adopt innovations to create value-added for their products and services to gain a competitive advantage and increase production efficiency. Therefore, this research aims to study the factors that influence the application of Industry 4.0 technology for managing electrical appliance production by focusing on five major factors: the internet of things, cloud manufacturing, big data analytics, additive manufacturing, and cyber-physical systems, which can be further subdivided into 23 sub-factors. The fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) technique is used to prioritize the factors to develop criteria for selecting appropriate applications of Industry 4.0 technology in manufacturing. Besides, a questionnaire based on the FANP approach is used to collect data from 82 electrical appliance manufacturers to calculate the weight of each factor. Consequently, the Internet of Things is ranked first, followed by big data analytics and additive manufacturing. While the results have indicated the importance of sub-factors as data-driven, data collection, tracking, monitoring, and automation, respectively. The benefit of this research is that manufacturers of electrical appliances can use this research as a criterion for implementing Industry 4.0 technology for long-term effectiveness.