A Roadmap for evolution of existing production system toward the factory of the future: A case study in automotive industry

Industry 4.0 and the factory of the future are presented as fourth industrial revolution, allowing to obtain more flexibility, agility and efficiency in production system. This revolution, known also digital transformation, is mainly based on using a great number of information and data during decision process. One of the main characteristics of this concept concerns the possibility of self-organization and self-optimization by applying a dynamic predictive decision-making approach. However, the way to achieve this kind of production system and its decision-making processes is long and not easy to obtain. Moreover, a lot of transformation in physical existing systems and/or information systems could be prerequisite. For these reasons, a good determination of roadmap for this transformation is the key of success. This paper proposes a new way for the determination of a roadmap for this kind of transformation in the automotive industry. We present our proposed approach and its application in a well-known company, Fiat Powertrain Technologies. Hence, firstly, four alternative projects for transformation toward industry 4.0 are presented. In order to class the strategic alternative projects, our approach propose to combine Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method with a simulation tool. This combination allows to have a better vision of incoming production system for the decision-makers during the evaluation of alternative projects. In fact, by using the simulation approach we observed that the experts can have a better vision of current and target system and evaluate more easily the importance of technological and managerial criteria on alternative projects. The results of classification by proposed approach for the roadmaps determination is finally discussed.