An advisory system to support Industry 4.0 readiness improvement

Industry 4.0 requires companies to go through a complex transformation. Numerous maturity models offer to measure the readiness of an enterprise for the transition to a new operation mode. However, there is a lack of research efforts in developing an advisory tool for digital readiness improvement recommendations. This study aims to create a systematic approach for building an advisory decision support system based on Industry 4.0 Maturity Models. The development of the proposed system has gone through three stages, including analysis of the existing maturity models, reviewing the development methods of decision-support systems, and industrial interactions with manufacturing companies via the project online recommendation tool. The developed advisory system provides I4.0 readiness recommendations based on industry best practices, integration of recommendation databases with a maturity model, information filtration algorithm, and weight-based prioritisation of suggestions. Moreover, an interactive and user-friendly interface was developed to enable the user to utilise the system easily and efficiently.