Exploring hidden pathways to sustainable manufacturing for cyber-physical production systems

• Published in: Heliyon Vol. 10; no. 8; p. e29004
• Main Authors: Pedone, Gianfranco, Váncza, József, Szaller, Ádám
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 30.04.2024; Elsevier
• Subjects: Cyber-physical production system; Semantic similarity; Sustainability; Text analysis; Text analysis; Semantic similarity; Sustainability; Cyber-physical production system
• ISSN: 2405-8440; 2405-8440
• DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e29004

Future manufacturing scenarios will likely be built around cyber-physical production systems. To succeed, this new manufacturing paradigm will also have to comply with the golden rule of sustainability. However, the concept of sustainability as defined in a number of high-level policy documents and recommendations requires disambiguation. The paper introduces HITECS, a novel, context-independent text analytics methodology for hidden correlation analysis in documents. HITECS is based on the assumption that there is a strong link between a concept and the words implicitly chosen to explain it. The analysis is based on the combination of bare words frequency and cosine similarity, excluding trivial, first-level terms (titles, keywords, and definitions). Processing a corpus of generally accepted documents related to various definitions and requirements of sustainability unfolded their hidden correlations and some common key concepts. These results indicate that terms like access, inclusion, global, change, together with others like resource, share, and integration, are among leading concepts in the high-level documents discussing the requirements of sustainability. A similar analysis in the domain of cyber-physical production systems shows strong conceptual overlaps but also gaps indicating pathways for future research and actions. •Disambiguation of sustainability concept, also for cyber-physical production systems.•Introduction of HITECS methodology for hidden textual correlation analysis.•Identification of fundamental pillars for a sustainable development.•Exploration of conceptual gaps and overlaps for future research pathways in CPPS.