Artificial Intelligence Landscape for Production Planning and Control in Industrie 4.0

The industrial manufacturing sector has been facing a digital transformation to the fourth industrial revolution or Industrie 4.0 (I4.0) within the processes of production planning and control (PPC) for several years. Due to the developments of big data and analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) plays an essential role in I4.0 as well. While having optimism for and ambition in the implementation of I4.0, organizations encounter difficulties to move forward due to the unclear use of IDTs and the lack of experts. It is suggested that organizations well-define the AI use cases and cooperate with third-party technologies providers. Therefore, to implement I4.0, it is necessary to have an overview that explains the relationships among processes, related AI use cases, required AI technology solutions, and third-party technology providers. While existing research clearly identifies the processes of PPC and AI technologies isolated from each other, an holistic overview that reveals their interrelationships appears to be missing. To bridge the scientific gap and support the development of I4.0, the research objective of the thesis is to build an AI landscape for PPC in I4.0 that explains the relationships and provides an overview of them.