Impacts and investigations of disruptive technologies for Industry 4.0

We live in an information age in which a massive amount of data is being produced to improve our daily lives. High computational demands are required to extract and understand the important messages hidden within the data and service interactions enabled by disruptive technologies, which is a collective term to refer to technologies behind Industry 4.0 to offer innovation and enable us to change the way we work. These allow all the businesses, cities and society to be competitive and progressive. Disruptive technologies are necessary to improve the speed, efficiency, effectiveness, quality, safety of real times data analysis and meet user’s expectations. Disruptive technologies for Industry 4.0 can address new needs of the individuals, businesses and society. They often include innovative products and services never used before. The right type of dissemination and strategies can lead to a rapid rise of popularity and adoption. Therefore, investigating of disruptive technologies and understanding their impact on Industry 4.0 has become strategically important.

Disruptive technologies can offer a high extent of innovation to integrate different services seamlessly and to improve the quality, effectiveness, efficiency and safety of services. High-tech services, seen in fictional movies 30-50 years ago, are now possible and available in real-life. This includes the wide use of the internet on smart phones, smart devices and services such as smart homes, smart hospitals, and smart cities enabled by destructive technologies in Industry 4.0. At the same time, knowing and implementing the most up-to-date recommendations, best practices and lessons learned for developing real-world solutions have become important when making progress in Industry 4.0. In summary, disruptive technologies can be crucial to provide impetus to improving the quality of life, regional economy and interactions between different communities to provide incentives and improvement to our quality of life together with Industry 4.0 development moving towards 5.0 era.

This special issue is targeted on disruptive technologies for Industry 4.0. Best paper winners and top authors from FEMIB 2020 http://femib.scitevents.org/ (5-6 May, 2020, Prague, Czech Republic) and IIoTBDSC 2020 http://iiotbdsc.com/ (Macao, SAR of China, September 15-17, 2020) can be invited. We also strongly welcome all the authors of unpublished work and high-quality outputs to submit.

Topics of Interest:

We seek the papers demonstrating theoretical and practical contributions, solutions and real use cases for industry 4.0. Real-world examples and demonstrations of real-world solutions are welcome, particularly investigations of its impacts, current status, futuristic and advanced services are required. Please note that TFSC is not a technical computing science journal and it is essential that authors know the types of content suitable for TFSC. These can be known as important destructive technologies for Industry 4.0 related to the following areas:

Industrial Internet of Things: All the data, networks and services are on the fog/edge computing and 5G networks to enable better infrastructure, platform and applications running on mobile devices, autonomous cars, high-end data centres and wide area of wireless networks and communications.Big data and data analytics: All the fusion, processing, analysis and visualization can be carried out in real-time, meeting the requirements for speed and accuracy. Insights and important findings in healthcare, finance, weather studies, geo-economics, social networks, security and manufacturing can be provided easily and accurately.Supply chain: Supply chain allows automation, smart manufacturing and seamlessly integrated services (between smart devices, and between smart devices and apps, and between smart apps and people) to work together well, thus improving efficiency, reducing costs and streamlining business.Blockchain in real world services: Whatever services we use, they can be booked, checked and authenticated. Blockchain can be used in wider areas, such as in finance, medical, security and smart services.Other emerging areas: Theoretical and practical contributions, solutions and real use cases of other emerging areas are largely welcome. These may include AI for everyday uses, since AI can be made more usable, interactive, efficient and effective for majority of services such as robots, purchasing, driverless cars, smart hospitals, smart cities, facial recognition, financial forecasting and predictive modelling for consumers.
Important Dates

Submission due: October 31, 2020

Pre-screening: November 15, 2020 or as soon as possible

1st Round notification: January 31, 2021

Revision submission: March 31, 2021

Final notification: May 31, 2021

Camera Ready submission: Autumn 2021

Submission guidelines

The Technological Forecasting and Social Change submission system will be open for submissions to our Special Issue from February 2020. When submitting your manuscript please select the article type “VSI: Impacts and investigations of destructive technologies for Industry 4.0”. Please submit your manuscript before October 31, 2020.

All submissions deemed suitable to be sent for peer review will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Once your manuscript is accepted, it will go into production, and will be simultaneously published in the current regular issue and pulled into the online Special Issue. Articles from this Special Issue will appear in different regular issues of the journal, though they will be clearly marked and branded as Special Issue articles.

Please see an example here:

Please use the standard TFSC electronic submission process to submit your paper and select VSI: Impacts and investigations of disruptive technologies for Industry 4.0 when you reach the Article Type step in the EVISE submission process. Please contact one of the editors in advance by e-mail if in doubt whether your paper fits into the special issue.

Guest editors

Prof. Victor Chang (Managing guest editor)
Teesside University, UK
Email: ic.victor.chang@gmail.com

Dr. Gary Wills
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Email: gbw@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Dr. Patricia Baudier
Ecole de Management Normandie, France
Email: PBAUDIER@em-normandie.fr