Transdisciplinary system of systems development in the trend to X4.0 for intelligent manufacturing

Since the announcement of Industry 4.0 in 2012, multiple variants of this industry paradigm have emerged and built on the common platform of Internet of Things. Engineering-driven industries such as aerospace and automotive and process-driven industries such as water treatment and food processing are influenced similarly trying to adapt to the so-called fourth generation (4.0) paradigm. In essence, the main outcomes of these X4.0 adaptations (where X can be any one of Quality, Water, Procurement, Gas or a combination of industries) are the facilitation of communications between socio-technical systems and the accumulation large amount of data. As the X4.0 paradigms are researched, defined, developed and applied, many real-world examples in a variety of industries have demonstrated a lack of system of systems design consideration. Participants are inhibited from working seamlessly and lag behind events triggered in the hostile real-world internet environment. This paper examines, from a high-level system of systems perspective, how transdisciplinary engineering can create a model of evolutionary X4.0 and how intelligent manufacturing can be developed towards X4.0 within the transdisciplinary modelling framework.