While Industry 4.0 has been trending in practice and research, operations management studies in this area remain nascent. Our intent is to understand the current state of research in Industry 4.0 in different disciplines and deduce insights and opportunities for future research in operations management. In this paper, we provide a focused analysis to examine the state-of-the-art research in Industry 4.0. To learn about researchers’ perspectives about Industry 4.0, we conducted a large-scale, cross-disciplinary and global survey on Industry 4.0 topics among researchers in industrial engineering, operations management, operations research, control and data science at the 9th IFAC MIM 2019 Conference in Berlin in August 2019. By using our survey findings and literature analysis, we build structural and conceptual frameworks to understand the current state of knowledge and to propose future research opportunities for operations management scholars. Glossary of Abbreviations AGV: Automated guided vehicle; AI: Artificial intelligence; APS: Advanced planning system: a wide variety of software tools and techniques, with many applications in manufacturing and logistics (including the service sector); BDA: Big data analytics; CAS: Complex adaptive system: a system composed of many interacting parts that evolve and adapt over time; CIM: Computer integrated manufacturing; CPFR: Collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment; CPS: Cyber-physical system: a seamless integration of computation and physical components; DAMCLS: Decision analysis, modelling, control and learning systems; ERP: Enterprise resource planning; FMS: Flexible manufacturing system; I4.0: Industry 4.0; IFAC: International Federation of Automatic Control: a federation is concerned with the impact of control technology on society; IME: Industrial and mechanical engineering; IoT: Internet-of-Things; IT: Information technology; M2M: Machine-to-machine; MAS: Multi-agent system: a loosely coupled network of software agents that interact to solve problems that are beyond the individual capacities or knowledge of each problem solver; OR: Operations research; RFID: Radio frequency identification: a technology that uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects; RMS: Reconfigurable manufacturing system: a manufacturing system that can change and evolve rapidly in order to adjust its productivity capacity and functionality; OM: Operations management; T&T: Track and trace system; VCA: VOS viewer co-occurrence analysis: a software tool for visualising bibliometric networks; VMI: Vendor-managed inventory.

The workforce ageing phenomenon is recently affecting most of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries, due to a general ageing of their populations and a higher average retirement age of the workforce. In this paper, the topic of ageing workforce management is addressed from a production research standpoint, with the aim of understanding how older workers can be supported and involved in a manufacturing system. First, the current state of the art related to the ageing workforce in production systems is presented. This is structured according to four main topics: (1) analysis and evaluation of ageing workers’ functional capacities, (2) consideration of ageing workers’ capacities in industrial system modelling and management, (3) analysis and exploitation of ageing workers’ expertise, (4) acknowledgement, analysis, design and integration of supporting technologies. Next, the discussion on the impact of the ageing workforce on manufacturing systems’ performances leads to the comparison of some technological advances that are related to the Industry 4.0 paradigms. Finally, a future research agenda on this topic is proposed, based on the same topics classification proposed for the literature analysis. Five different research areas are derived, suggesting future directions for appropriate research concerning the employ of older workers in production environments.

The effects of workforce differences on manufacturing systems have attracted the attention of a wide range of researchers in recent years. The differences between workers in terms of skills, age, gender and anthropometric measures have a large impact on production system performance. In this study, the workforce differences factors in production system design and modelling were investigated, with the aim of understanding how the differences between workers could influence a production system and how they had been considered in previous studies. The papers selected from the Scopus database were categorised based on whether how human factors are incorporated into manufacturing system optimisation and design approaches is discussed therein or is not. To find relevant papers, two sets of keywords were defined: (1) keywords relating to the differences between workers and (2) keywords relating to the kind of problem under study. Furthermore, the investigated papers helped highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature and derive a discussion on the possible future research steps.

In manual assembly systems, workers’ differences in terms of skills, level of expertise and perceived physical effort largely affect the assembly line balancing and system performance. Traditional long-term strategic decisions may not respond to workforce changes and needs, resulting in frequent requests for line rebalancing. In this study, we propose a methodological framework and an easy-to-use Assembly Line Worker Assignment and Rebalancing Problem with different options: workers’ assignment considering their performance variability, integration of worker dependent physical exertion constraints and possibility to use trainers to assist inexperienced workers. A bi-objective linear programming model is proposed aiming to minimise the cycle time and the number of reassigned tasks to respect the initial design while integrating new workers with different characteristics. The $ϵ$-constraint approach is used to build Pareto frontiers for this bi-objective problem. This approach is applied to three real cases. The obtained results show that the developed model can be successfully used in manufacturing companies to help the production managers to deal with workforce turnover and skills heterogeneity.