A Collaborative Approach in Designing Curriculum for Industry 4.0 Software Integration Implementation

Working in Industry 4.0 enabled environments requires multi-disciplinary skills. Academic programs that produce graduates who are ready to support Industry 4.0 concepts need to offer curricula that prepare students to implement different aspects of Industry 4.0 as soon as they enter the workforce. Designing a full new curriculum or modifying an existing curriculum are challenging due to the multidisciplinary nature of the Industry 4.0 implementation. A possible approach involves collaboration between teams of academics specialized in hardware and in software who often belong to distinct academic programs, and include topics that generally belong to different academic specializations. Although such collaboration can be defined in theory, implementing it in an academic program brings a series of challenges. This paper presents a collaborative work that addresses the challenge of integrating software-specific topics in automation engineering and software engineering programs, and describes an experiential learning environment that demonstrate physical implementation of several Industry 4.0 concepts.