Society 5.0 [1] and Industry 4.0 [2] compel the digital transformation of all the domains, and demand highly qualified workforce [3]. Although the concept of Industry 4.0 emerged in Germany [2], it is now of high relevance in Europe and also internationally (e.g., [3], [5], [13]). University-industry partnerships were built to prepare the future workforce in a highly digitalized industry and human-centric society, and to support technology transfer [4]. In this context, concepts such as Education 4.0 [5] and Digital Education Ecosystems (DEEs) emerged; the DEEs signify here inter-connected heterogeneous and disperse e-learning Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructures and information systems used in education activities in in-person, blended, or fully on-line settings, and in university-industry partnerships, which are enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems.    

   With the increasing use of the ICT infrastructures in education activities and university-industry partnerships, with the growing amount of data created and stored in databases on premise or on public clouds, and analytics executed to improve educational activities, ensuring sustainability (with respect to environment, economic, social, educational areas) is crucial. Sustainability in education and university-industry partnerships is a new area; few studies exist that identify and assess the scope, development and evolution of the goals of sustainability in education [6]. Although digital education is considered as an adequate approach for sustainable education [7], there is no framework to guide the relevant stakeholders in attaining the goals to ensure sustainability in educational activities executed in university-industry partnerships, and in the design and deployment of the DEEs and ICT infrastructures that support university-industry partnerships and education activities towards preparing the highly qualified workforce required by Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0. This work addresses this gap.

   The aim of this work is to present a framework that assists relevant stakeholders (e.g., educators, industry representatives, policy makers, students, academic institutions) in identifying, analyzing, and addressing the challenges towards ensuring sustainability in the ICT infrastructures and DEEs supporting educational activities and university-industry partnerships towards supplying the highly qualified workforce demanded by Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0. Next to challenges for education sustainability, technology-related challenges for environment sustainability (e.g., green computing, sustainable software) relevant for realizing the goals of the university-industry partnerships and required ICT infrastructures and DEEs are also addressed by this framework. This work enhances the existing body of literature and knowledge regarding the areas of environment and education sustainability, and proposes concrete steps to be taken for realizing sustainable university-industry partnerships.    

   The proposed framework was constructed based on the findings of a literature review conducted following the guidelines of the PRISMA method [8] and builds on the results of previous research and development work conducted, such as: [9] which identified and analyzed challenges of Education 4.0 and DEEs: ICT infrastructure, interoperability, development of artificial intelligence algorithms to aid education, implementation, security, data protection and privacy,  [10] that analyzed areas of relevance for Education 4.0, namely: knowledge, skills and qualifications in Education 4.0; teaching; learning; implementation; e-assessment; and quality assurance,  [11] which presented the work towards the design and deployment of an item bank and its role within a service-oriented system architecture that enables the execution of e-assessment activities (e.g., from item design and e-test creation, to the analysis of logs generated by exam-takers), and  [12] which analyzed standardization approaches for e-learning and interoperability challenges for e-learning ICT infrastructures in the context of the classroom of the future.

Aiming to identify and analyze prominent challenges towards ensuring sustainability of the ICT infrastructures and DEEs supporting educational activities and university-industry partnerships towards supplying the highly qualified workforce demanded by Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0, a literature review was conducted following the PRISMA guidelines [8]. The digital libraries of the ACM and Science Direct were searched to identify relevant works, as they represent the most relevant databases in the areas of education and technology in the context of Industry 4.0. Because the concept of Industry 4.0 was firstly introduced in 2015-2016, the searches performed concern the time interval from 2016 to 2022. The following keywords were used to execute the searches: “sustainability”, “university-industry partnership”, “Industry 4.0”, “Education 4.0”, “digital education” “digital education ecosystem”, “ICT infrastructure”, “information and communication technology infrastructure”. Queries executed contain the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, e.g., ((“sustainability” AND “university-industry partnership” AND (“ICT infrastructure” OR “information and communication technology infrastructure”)); (“sustainability” and “Education 4.0”); (“sustainability” AND (“digital education” OR “digital education ecosystem”)). Searches on Google Scholar were also executed to identify systematic literature reviews in these areas. To retain only the relevant literature, inclusion and exclusion criteria were defined. For example, by reading the title and abstract, the clearly out of scope articles were excluded. The articles not available in English, or the ones for which full access was not granted were eliminated. The articles that only refereed broadly to the concept of sustainability, without tackling the topics of university-industry partnerships, Industry 4.0, Education 4.0, digital education ecosystems were also excluded. Next to the literature review conducted, the result of previous research and development work executed were also used in constructing the proposed framework, e.g., [9] where challenges of Education 4.0 and DEEs are identified and analyzed: ICT infrastructure, interoperability, development of artificial intelligence algorithms to aid education, implementation, security, data protection and privacy, [10 ] that analyzed areas of relevance for Education 4.0, [11] which presents the work towards the design and deployment of an item bank and its role within a service-oriented system architecture that enables the execution of e-assessment activities, and [12] which focuses on standards and interoperability challenges for e-learning infrastructures for the classroom of the future.

Being aware of the need for highly qualified workforce in the context of Industry 4.0, numerous works focus on the skills and knowledge the young graduates and employees need to have; for example, according to [13] “must have” technical skills include IT and statistical knowledge, data and information processing and analytics, organizational and processual understanding, ease to interact with novel interfaces, and “must have” personal skills comprise self- and time management, adaptability, teamwork, social and communication abilities. University-industry partnerships were created to address the need for highly qualified workforce of Industry 4.0, and concepts such as Education 4.0 [5] and DEEs emerged. Addressing sustainability in this context is crucial. However, sustainability in education and university-industry partnerships is a new area and research and development work is scarce [6]. By performing a literature review following the PRISMA guidelines [8] and based on previous research work, a framework is proposed, which is aimed to assist relevant stakeholders (e.g., educators, industry representatives, policy makers, students, academic institutions) in identifying, analyzing, and addressing the challenges towards ensuring sustainability in the ICT infrastructures and DEEs supporting educational activities and university-industry partnerships towards supplying the highly qualified workforce demanded by Industry 4.0. Next to challenges for education sustainability, technology-related challenges for environment sustainability (e.g., green computing, sustainable software) relevant for realizing the goals of the university-industry partnerships and required ICT infrastructures and DEEs are also tackled.

[1] A. Deguchi et al. (2020) What is society 5.0?. In: Society 5.0 A people-centric super-smart society. Hitachi-UTokyo Laboratory, Springer Open, Chapter 1, pp. 1—24. [2]DIN Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V. (2016) DIN SPEC 91345:2016-04: Referenzarchitekturmodell Industrie 4.0 (RAMI4.0). [3]L. Li. (2022). Reskilling and Upskilling the Future-ready Workforce for Industry 4.0 and Beyond. Information Systems Frontiers, 13 July 2022, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-022-10308-y [4]R. Alkhazaleh, K. Mykoniatis, A. Alahmer. (2022) The Success of Technology Transfer in the Industry 4.0 Era: A Systematic Literature Review. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market and Complexity: 8, 202. https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc8040202 [5]da Motta Reis et al. (2020) Education 4.0: Gaps research between school formation and technological development. In: Latifi S. (eds.) International Conference on Information Technology – New Generation ITNG 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing vol. 1134, Springer, Cham, pp. 415-420. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43020-7_55 [6] P. Colás-Bravo et al. (2021) Sustainability and Digital Teaching Competence in Higher Education. Sustainability 2021, 13(22), 12354; https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212354 [7] M.J. Sousa et al. (2022) Digital learning is an educational format towards sustainable education. Sustainability. Sustainability 2022, 14, 1140. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14031140 [8] D. Moher et al. (2009) Preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analyses: The PRISMA statement. PLOS Medicine 6(7), e1000097, doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.b2535 [9] C. -M. Chituc (2022) An Analysis of Technical Challenges for Education 4.0 and Digital Education Ecosystems, IEEE German Education Conference (GeCon), Berlin, Germany, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/GeCon55699.2022.9942758. [10] C.-M. Chituc (2021) A Framework for Education 4.0 in Digital Education Ecosystems. In: Camarinha-Matos, L.M., Boucher, X., Afsarmanesh, H. (eds) Smart and Sustainable Collaborative Networks 4.0. PRO-VE 2021. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 629. Springer, Cham, pp. 702-709. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85969-5_66 [11] C.-M. Chituc, M. Herrmann, D. Schiffner, M. Rittberger (2019) Towards the Design and Deployment of an Item Bank: An Analysis of the Requirements Elicited. In: Herzog, M. et al. (eds) Advances in Web-Based Learning – ICWL 2019. ICWL 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11841. Springer, Cham, pp. 155-162. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35758-0_15 [12] C. -M. Chituc, M. Rittberger (2019) Understanding the Importance of Interoperability Standards in the Classroom of the Future, IECON 2019 - 45th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 6801-6806, doi: 10.1109/IECON.2019.8927631. [13] L. Gehrke, Kühn A., Rule D., Moore P., Bellmann C. et al. (2015) A Discussion of Qualifications and Skills in the Factory of the Future: A German and American Perspective, VDI The Association of German Engineers, Düsseldorf, Germany.