Production Disturbances Handling: Where Are We and Where Are We Heading?

Half of manufacturing companies' production capacity is estimated to be compromised due to disturbances. With the upcoming Industry 4.0, this problem is expected to be minimized through technological solutions. The aim of this article is to propose alternatives to handle production disturbances by means of technological support, to minimize their occurrence and impacts. To this purpose, we conducted a literature review and a series of interviews with five companies. We distinguish six stages for handling production disturbances: detection, diagnosis, mitigation/correction, root cause analysis, prevention, and prediction. Our results indicate that all these stages are expected to benefit from Industry 4.0 technologies significantly. Furthermore, our results point out that practitioners perceive the stages of prevention and prediction with the highest potential for improvement. However, focus on the diagnosis and root cause analysis stages is also necessary since those stages are coupled to the prevention and prediction. The contributions of this article are twofold. Firstly, it provides a holistic view of the stages and technologies to handle production disturbances in Industry 4.0, from which practitioners can extract directions for implementation. Secondly, the paper provides focus for further research in the field of disturbance management with the identification of the current challenges.