English | EN INDUSTRIE 4.0: TOWARDS AN INTERNET OF THINGS, DATA AND SERVICES
Dec 11, 2013
One of 10 “Future Projects” identified by the German government as part of its High-Tech Strategy 2020 Action Plan, the Industrie 4.0 project represents a major opportunity to establish Europe as an integrated industry lead market and provider.
The world as we know and experience it today has been shaped by three major technological revolutions. The first Industrial Revolution, beginning in Great Britain at the tail end of the 18th century and ending in the mid- 19th century, represented a radical shift away from an agrarian economy to one defined by the introduction of mechanical production methods.
The second period of radical transformation – with the advent of industrial production and the birth of the factory at the start of the 20th century – was no less precipitous; ushering in as it did an age of affordable consumer products for mass consumption. In the late 1960s the use of electronics and IT in industrial processes opened the door to a new age of optimized and automated production.more–>
Today we stand on the cusp of a fourth industrial revolution; one which promises to marry the worlds of production and network connectivity in an “Internet of Things” which makes “Industrie 4.0” a reality. “Smart production” becomes the norm in a world where intelligent IT-based machines, systems and networks are capable of independently exchanging and responding to information to manage industrial production processes.
Cyber-physical system (CPS) technologies ingeniously marry the digital virtual world with the real world. Cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) made up of smart machines, logistics systems and production facilities allow peerless IT-based integration for vertically integrated and networked manufacturing.
The Internet of Things is finding its way into production. Semantic machine-to-machine communication revolutionizes factories by decentralized control. Embedded digital product memories guide the flexible work piece flow through smart factories, so that low-volume, high-mix production is realized in a cost-efficient way. A new generation of industrial assistant systems using augmented reality and multimodal interaction will help factory workers to deal with the complexity of cyber-physical production and enable new forms of collaboration by digital social media. Since on-demand production of highly individualized products like cars or kitchens requires short logistic chains in the markets where they are used, production is guaranteed to remain the backbone of economic performance.
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