Industry 4.0

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 exante for a planned “4th industrial revolution”, the term being a reminiscence of software versioning. Decisive for the fast spread was the recommendation for implementation to the German Government, which carried the term in its title and was picked up willingly by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and has become an eponym for a future project in the context of the high-tech strategy 2020. Currently an industrial platform consisting of three well-known industry associations named “Industry 4.0” is contributing to the dispersion of the term. Outside of the German-speaking area, the term is not common. In this paper the term “Industry 4.0” describes a future project that can be defined by two development directions. On the one hand there is a huge applicationpull, which induces a remarkable need for changes due to changing operative framework conditions. Triggers for this are general social, economic, and political changes. Those are in particular: Short development periods: Development periods and innovation periods need to be shortened. High innovation capability is becoming an essential success factor for many enterprises (“time to market”). Individualization on demand: A change from a seller’s into a buyer’s market has been becoming apparent for decades now, which means buyers can define the conditions of the trade. This trend leads to an increasing individualization of products and in extreme cases to individual products. This is also called “batch size one”.  Due to the new framework requirements, higher flexibility in product development, especially in production, is necessary.  To cope with the specified conditions, faster decisionmaking procedures are necessary. For this, organizational hierarchies need to be reduced.  Increasing shortage and the related increase of prices for resources as well as social change in the context of ecological aspects require a more intensive focus on sustainability in industrial contexts. The aim is an economic and ecological increase in efficiency. On the other hand, there is an exceptional technology-push in industrial practice. This technology-push has already influenced daily routine in private areas. Buzzwords are Web 2.0, Apps,