Sustainable Development with Industry 4.0 and the Potential for Increased Performance on Economy and Social Aspects
Abstract
In order to achieve and maintain a sustainable society, the manufacturing research and development efforts performed needs to aim for sustainable solutions. The only path to a more sustainable society is to enable humans to think and act more sustainably, and industry 4.0 provides excellent opportunities. However, this is only possible if awareness of how our actions influence the sustainability balance of the world. With this in mind, we can also recognize that industry 4.0 is becoming reality today and it is time to reap the many benefits available. The digital analyses need to aim for holistic solution, not sub-optimization, and take heed of impact on cost, people and the planet. This talk will mainly focus on how Industry 4.0 can utilize digitalization to facilitate sound social and economic effects on production systems development. Recent research on sustainability awareness shows that it is essential to change mindset and educate researchers on how to cognitively be aware on sustainability aspects in the context of their own research in order to develop sound solutions for industrial practitioners. The number of digital solutions addressing sustainability aspect more holistically is growing ever faster, but they only matter if we go beyond awareness and start to act, Avancez !
Short Biography
Dr. Björn Johansson holds a chair as Professor in Sustainable Production at Industrial and Materials Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research is applied and focuses on utilization of virtual tools for sustainable production system development. Specific areas of interest are: Industry 4.0, digitalization, 5G Enabled manufacturing, discrete event simulation, input data management, scheduling, layout planning, balancing, 3D-Visualisation, AR/VR applications, sustainability measures of production operations, lifecycle assessment and circular economy.
Björn Johansson is the immediate past president of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International (www.scs.org) with approximately 3000 members in around 100 countries. Björn is also an active lifetime member of AAAS (www.aaas.org) where he promotes research and contributes with symposia as well as active in the organization within section E -Engineering. Björn is a lifetime member of ASME and is organizing a track under ASME CIE each year on Simulation in Advanced Manufacturing.
Current research includes main tutor for nine PhD students with in the area of digitalisation and sustainability in production systems, leading roles in five large EU projects as well as several national projects with applied research with industrial context as the core. Professor Johansson does also maintain strong links with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, where he also spent around four year as a guest researcher jointly developing three standards for simulation sustainable manufacturing, as well as facilitating several years of research exchange for other researchers.
In addition to the actual research Björn is also frequently involved in setting up and evaluation research initiatives inside countries (Norway, Sweden, Austria), in-between countries, USA-Sweden, Japan-Sweden, Germany-Sweden, Finland-USA as well as internal EU reviews of proposals as well as monitoring of large EU and national research efforts.