Analysis and evaluation of Indian industrial system requirements and barriers affect during implementation of Industry 4.0 technologies

In recent years, competition among the Indian manufacturing industries (IMI) has increased enormously in the global market. The current uncertainty in the market context is characterised and governed by the customised requirements of the customers. Thus, the manufacturing system in the industries should be capable of adapting the parameters like flexibility in scalability, variety, agility, system responsiveness, inter-connectivity, automatic data exchange with communication among the manufacturing systems, transparency and human-machine interaction, which are the main components and principles of Industry 4.0 (I4.0). Thus, adopting I4.0 plays a vital role to corroborate its long-term survival in the global marketplace. However, very few research work considerations contribute towards the issues induced during the adoption of I4.0 in manufacturing industries. This paper aims to minimise the gap between the existing Industrial System Requirements (ISRs) and the challenges faced during implementing I4.0 technologies in existing Industries. The identified ISRs and barriers were evaluated and analysed based on the data set collected from a questionnaire-based survey. Fuzzy multi-criteria analysis is conducted to identify the most weighted ISRs and barriers and ranked them concerning their importance. Furthermore, the inter-item correlation between both of them is analysed. This research work offers the researchers, practitioners, and industrialists an opportunity to formulate multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problems through numerous case studies and prioritise the top barriers, system requirements and the inter-relationship shared between them.