Industry 4.0: the fourth industrial revolution - guide to Industrie 4.0

IoT (Internet of Things), the convergence of IT and OT, rapid application development, digital twin simulation models, cyber-physical systems, advanced robots and cobots, additive manufacturing, autonomous production, consistent engineering across the entire value chain, thorough data collection and provisioning, horizontal and vertical integration, the cloud, big data analytics, virtual/augmented reality and edge computing amidst a shift of intelligence towards the edge (artificial intelligence indeed): these are some of the essential technological components of the fourth industrial revolution. Those are quite a lot of terms and components indeed. Yet, Industry 4.0 is a rather vast vision and, increasingly, vast reality that also stretches beyond merely these technological aspects. It is an end-to-end industrial transformation. What makes it all the more fascinating (and at first sight complex) is that convergence of two worlds which have been disconnected thus far: Information ...