Industry 4.0 Technologies Applied to Inland Waterway Transport: Systematic Literature Review.

The focus of this article is inland waterway transport. Different problems in this domain have been studied due to the increase in waterway traffic globally. Industry 4.0 technologies have become an alternative for the possible solution of these problems. For this reason, this paper aims to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the main problems in transporting cargo by inland waterway? (2) What technological strategies are being studied to solve these problems? (3) What technologies from Industry 4.0 are used within the technological strategies to solve the exposed problems? This study adopts a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach. For this work, were recovered 645 articles, 88 of which were eligible, from which we could identify five domains corresponding to (1) traffic monitoring, (2) smart navigation, (3) emission reduction, (4) analytics with big data, and (5) cybersecurity. The strategies currently being considered combine navigation technologies, such as AIS (Automatic Identification System), which offers a large amount of data, with Industry 4.0 tools and mainly machine learning techniques, to take advantage of data collected over a long time. This study is, to our knowledge, one of the first to show how Industry 4.0 technologies are currently being used to tackle inland waterway transport problems and current application trends in the scientific community, which is a first step for the development of future studies and more advanced solutions.

Industry 4.0 Technologies Applied to the Rail Transportation Industry: A Systematic Review.

BACKGROUND: Industry 4.0 technologies have been widely used in the railway industry, focusing mainly on maintenance and control tasks necessary in the railway infrastructure. Given the great potential that these technologies offer, the scientific community has come to use them in varied ways to solve a wide range of problems such as train failures, train station security, rail system control and communication in hard-to-reach areas, among others. For this reason, this paper aims to answer the following research questions: what are the main issues in the railway transport industry, what are the technologic strategies that are currently being used to solve these issues and what are the technologies from industry 4.0 that are used in the railway transport industry to solve the aforementioned issues? METHODS: This study adopts a systematic literature review approach. We searched the Science Direct and Web of Science database inception from January 2017 to November 2021. Studies published in conferences or journals written in English or Spanish were included for initial process evaluation. The initial included papers were analyzed by authors and selected based on whether they helped answer the proposed research questions or not. RESULTS: Of the recovered 515 articles, 109 were eligible, from which we could identify three main application domains in the railway industry: monitoring, decision and planification techniques, and communication and security. Regarding industry 4.0 technologies, we identified 9 different technologies applied in reviewed studies: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, Big Data, Cybersecurity, Modelling and Simulation, Smart Decision Support Systems (SDSS), Computer Vision and Virtual Reality (VR). This study is, to our knowledge, one of the first to show how industry 4.0 technologies are currently being used to tackle railway industry problems and current application trends in the scientific community, which is highly useful for the development of future studies and more advanced solutions. FUNDING: Colombian national organizations Minciencias and the Mining-Energy Planning Unit.