The Fourth Industrial Revolution & Manufacturing Engineering : From the Perspective of Utilization of Engineering Software

The World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland in January this year raised a global issue by suggesting a new subject, “Mastering of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Compared to the previous subjects which were general economic issues such as low economic growth rate, interregional conflicts, inequality, and unemployment, this new agenda, the Fourth Industrial Revolution reflects enhanced global interests on rapid changes of technologies and economic environments. Korea also strives to find appropriate ways to respond to the global trend by conducting various researches and having discussions. However, the concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is not clearly understood in Korea. People understand it as an event different from innovation, and identify it as the development of specific technologies, even putting too much emphasis on the utilization of new technologies.Regarding the Fourth Industrial Revolution, such a high interest in IoT, Cloud Computing, Big-data, AI, and 3D printing is highly understandable since they are a kind of fundamental infrastructure underpinning the Hyper Connectivity. However, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is still underway as an ex-ante. Moreover, it is expected to take more than 10 to 20 years for a complete form of Smart Factory to appear. Therefore, it is time to focus more on “What to Connect”, rather than having interests in the infrastructure related to “How to Connect”. In other words, it is time to secure the sustainability of innovation which buttresses continuous technology development and competition for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In this respect, this research discusses Manufacturing Engineering (ME) as an innovation enabler by understanding the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a process of manufacturing innovation. This research tries to suggest an adequate response to the Fourth Industrial Revolution through the analysis on the ME, leading a shift of the manufacturing paradigm