Industry 4.0

Excerpt

Industry is the part of an economy that produces material goods which are highly mechanized and automatized. Ever since the beginning of industrialization, technological leaps have led to paradigm shifts which today are ex-post named “industrial revolutions”: in the field of mechanization (the so-called 1st industrial revolution), of the intensive use of electrical energy (the so-called 2nd industrial revolution), and of the widespread digitalization (the so-called 3rd industrial revolution). On the basis of an advanced digitalization within factories, the combination of Internet technologies and future-oriented technologies in the field of “smart” objects (machines and products) seems to result in a new fundamental paradigm shift in industrial production. The vision of future production contains modular and efficient manufacturing systems and characterizes scenarios in which products control their own manufacturing process. This is supposed to realize the manufacturing of individual products in a batch size of one while maintaining the economic conditions of mass production. Tempted by this future expectation, the term “Industry 4.0” was established ex-ante for a planned “4th industrial revolution”, the term being a reminiscence of software versioning. …