Emerging Enabling Technologies for Industry 4.0 and Beyond

Rapid advances in technology have spurred tremendous progress in developing the next generation of Industry 4.0 that was initially introduced in 2011 as a German strategic initiative for revolutionizing the manufacturing sector. Ten years have passed since 2011. In these ten years, numerous new and promising technologies and applications have been developed. The original concept of Industry 4.0, including the conceptual framework, technology framework, and enabling technologies, has experienced tremendous changes. As such, the new generation of Industry 4.0 emerges, which is also called Industry 5.0. Today, we are on the cusp of the Industry 4.0 evolution supported by a new set of enabling technologies. In such evolution of Industry 4.0, future Industry 4.0 requires a combination of recently emerging new technologies, which is giving rise to the emergence of the next generation of Industry 4.0 or Industry 5.0. Such technologies originate from different disciplines, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G/6G, Quantum Computing, and others. The technologies in the original Industry 4.0 framework, such as Cyber-Physical Systems, IoT, etc., will be affected by Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G/6G, and Quantum Computing. At this present moment, the emergence of a new era of Industry 4.0 can be seen. In this paper, we briefly survey the main emerging enabling technologies in Industry 4.0 as it relates to industries.