Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0

The "Industry 4.0" initiative describes the implementation of so-called smart factories, which includes intelligent interaction between human beings and machinery. It involves the integration of intelligent workpieces, manufacturing equipment and flexible value-adding procedures into the production process. This seeks to achieve distributed production with a maximum of flexibility at a minimum of cost. In a smart factory, systems keep people informed about production and status and provide assistance with the control and monitoring of the process. A smart factory is characterised by the communication between products and the machinery which makes them. The product retains information about its own manufacture in machine-readable form, on an RFID chip for example. With the help of this data, the passage of the product through the manufacturing system and the individual steps in its manufacture can be controlled.