The role of crowdsourcing in industry 4.0: a systematic literature review

The presented study seeks to identify the role of crowdsourcing within the scope of Industry 4.0. For this purpose, a Systematic Literature Review was performed, starting from 476 articles that mentioned crowdsourcing' and 'Industry 4.0', which were reduced to 31 articles that comprised the corpus of the review work after exclusion filters were applied. These articles brought factors related to the concept of Industry 4.0 and discussed the role of crowdsourcing to support the implementation of Industry 4.0. The review identified a set of five categories of crowdsourcing application in Industry 4.0: product development; innovation; provision of data and information for manufacturing; crowdsensing; and problem solving/troubleshooting. The study was also able to explore the relationship among these categories. Industry 4.0 factors were also related to the Internet of Things, Intelligent Production Systems, Big Data and Cloud Computing, all of which were extensively mentioned in the reviewed body of literature.