Decision-Making in Future Industrial Systems: Is Ethics a New Performance Indicator?
Résumé
This study deals with ethical aspects of decision-making in the context of future industrial systems such as depicted by the Industry 4.0 principles. These systems involve a great number of interacting elements, with more or less autonomy. In this sense, ethics may become an important mean to ensure a long-term viable joint integration of humans and artificial elements in future industrial systems merged into the society. Two complementary views can be thus identified to integrate ethics in such future industrial systems. The first view conventionally defines ethics as a non-negotiable static set of conditions and rules to be met by the considered systems throughout their lifecycle. The second view assumes that ethics can be seen as a performance factor to which a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is associated and which can, therefore, be more or less directly measured and lead to improvement through time. Starting from an overall definition of the concept of ethics, its conventional vision and its specifications regarding future industrial systems, these two views are exposed and discussed, leading to the establishment of some properties for the definition of a generic framework to handle ethics throughout decision-making processes. Concluding remarks and prospects are finally presented.