The Nine Pillars of technology for Industry 4.0

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is a strategic initiative introduced by the German government during early 2010s to transform industrial manufacturing through digitalisation and exploitation of the potentials of new technologies. It is an effort to increase productivity and efficiency mainly in the manufacturing sector. Industry 4.0 production system aims to be highly flexible and should be able to produce individualised and customised products. In fact, it is an exciting employment of automation within manufacturing, covering the use of robotics, data management, cloud computing and the intemet of things (IoT). It has started to show that artificial intelligence, robotics, smart sensors and integrated systems are an important part of a normal manufacturing process. In interaction with machines, it needs horizontal integration at every step in the production process. The Americans have the same concept for Industry 4.0 but prefer to call it Smart Factory. The nine pillars of Industry 4.0 transforms isolated cell production into a fully optimised, integrated and automated production flow.