**3. Concepts and methodology**

The Industry 4.0 concept implementation in SMEs requires the use of sustainability as the kernel of the company's digital transformation. This c proposes the use of GRAI methodology in combination with lean manufacturing, DMAIC, and Design of Experiments for elaborating a sustainable framework for this transformation in order to improve the company performance [45]. The framework allows to improve the company supply chain through three axes (**Figure 1**).


#### **Figure 1.** *Framework for sustainable Industry 4.0 concept implementation.*

• And the informational transformation involving the integration of an information system such as ERP, MES, WMS in the company for improving its performance, but also the exploitation of an intelligent manufacturing system including the decision aided module, the human-machine interface, and the cyber-physical system adapted to the company being transformed.

The sustainable digital transformation is supported by intelligent manufacturing and logistics human-machine collaboration (HMC) system (**Figure 2**). The objective is to facilitate the collaboration between the physical new technologies (robots, cobots, mobile robots, IoTs), the information system, and the operators but also contribute to the production processes optimization. It will allow the operators to be at the center of the production process in terms of ergonomics, production management, and flexibility.

The software tool is composed of the following:


#### **Figure 2.**

*Architecture of the intelligent manufacturing and logistics HMC system.*

*Production Systems Performance Optimization through Human/Machine Collaboration DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102036*


In addition to the framework and the intelligent manufacturing HMC system, a sustainable flexibility 4.0 approach has been defined for optimizing the use of the manufacturing resources (technical and human). The following part is destined to this flexibility.
