The Role of Engineering Education in Industry 4.0 Era

Dear Colleagues,

The “fourth industrial revolution” also called “Industry 4.0” is transforming a wide range of industrial sectors from design to manufacturing to construction, including both of their connected supply chains. This will create an increased technical and organizational complexity of industrial processes and therefore an increase in demand for qualified staff at all organizational levels. The entailing increased degree of digitization and automation requires a dramatic change for engineering education. The required competencies of future engineers consist of advanced hard skills consisting of an integration of industrial engineering with mechatronics and informatics engineering competencies. Such skills are needed to re-engineer processes with the support of information technology and automation to increase interconnection and collaboration among machines and human operators. Moreover, future engineers require soft skills like teamwork ability, problem analysis abilities, structuring capabilities, data analysis and interpretation skills.

This Special Issue represents a collection of pioneering first applications of learning factories in the era of Industry 4.0 as well as innovative ideas for future engineering education.  

Submissions to the Special Issue could relate, but are not limited, to the following topics:

• Learning factories
• Virtual learning environments
• Engineering education in the era of Industry 4.0
• Hands-on engineering education
• Operator 4.0
• Competence development
• Active learning.

References:

• Coskun, S., Kayikci, Y., & Gencay, E. (2017). Adapting Engineering Education to Industrie 4.0 Vision. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.08806.
• Erol, S., Jäger, A., Hold, P., Ott, K., & Sihn, W. (2016). Tangible Industry 4.0: a scenario-based approach to learning for the future of production. Procedia CIRP, 54, 13-18.
• Frerich, S., Meisen, T., Richert, A., Petermann, M., Jeschke, S., Wilkesmann, U., & Tekkaya, A. E. (Eds.). (2017). Engineering Education 4.0: Excellent Teaching and Learning in Engineering Sciences. Springer.
• Matt, D. T., Orzes, G., Rauch, E., & Dallasega, P. (2018). Urban Production–a Socially Sustainable Factory Concept to overcome Shortcomings of Qualified Workers in Smart SMEs. Computers & Industrial Engineering. Article In Press.
• Matt, D. T., Rauch, E., & Dallasega, P. (2014). Mini-factory–a learning factory concept for students and small and medium sized enterprises. Procedia CiRP, 17, 178-183.
• Schuster, K., Groß, K., Vossen, R., Richert, A., & Jeschke, S. (2016). Preparing for industry 4.0–collaborative virtual learning environments in engineering education. In Engineering Education 4.0(pp. 477-487). Springer, Cham.

Dr.-Ing. Patrick Dallasega
Guest Editor

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• Learning factories
• Operator 4.0
• Engineering education
• Active learning