Production Planning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Literature Review

Through the decades, production planning activities have sought to balance market requirements and the optimal use of available resources in different industries. In the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this study aims to disclose the purposes of production planning activities. To this end, this paper provides a literature review of the existing offer of production planning applications over the past 10 years. The authors propose a framework based on the objectives, scope and resources. The research conducted demonstrates that due to the uncertainty of the external environment, research propositions on production planning are focused on shorter planning horizons. The research also indicates that in order to face disruptions, production planning applications are mainly addressed to balance resource utilization. Ultimately, the study shows that a considerable part of innovative production planning applications have not yet been applied to real industrial cases, and moreover, they remain experimental propositions with no further use.