A Comprehensive Review of the Fourth Industrial Revolution IR 4.0 in Oil and Gas Industry

Digital transformation is one of the most discussed themes across the globe. The disruptive potential arising from the joint deployment of IoT, robotics, AI and other advanced technologies is projected to be over $300 trillion over the next decade. With the advances and implementation of these technologies, they have become more widely-used in all aspects of oil and gas industry in several processes. Yet, as it is a relatively new area in petroleum industry with promising features, the industry overall is still trying to adapt to IR 4.0. This paper examines the value that Industry 4.0 brings to the oil and gas upstream industry. It delineates key Industry 4.0 solutions and analyzes their impact within this segment. A comprehensive literature review has been carried out to investigate the IR 4.0 concept's development from the beginning, the technologies it utilizes, types of technologies transferred from other industries with a longer history of use, robustness and applicability of these methods in oil and gas industry under current conditions and the incremental benefits they provide depending on the type of the field are addressed. Real field applications are illustrated with applications indifferent parts of the world with challenges, advantages and drawbacks discussed and summarized that lead to conclusions on the criteria of application of machine learning technologies.