Industry 4.0: state of the art and future trends

TLDR

Rapid advances in industrialisation and informatisation have propelled the development of next‑generation manufacturing technologies, positioning the world on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, with initiatives like Germany’s Industry 4.0 and China’s Made‑in‑China 2025 driving integration of cyber‑physical systems, IoT, cloud computing, and other emerging technologies, yet the lack of powerful tools and formal methods remains a major obstacle. The paper surveys the current state of the art in Industry 4.0 technologies and their industrial applications. The authors conduct a brief survey of existing Industry 4.0 technologies and their industrial applications.

Abstract

Rapid advances in industrialisation and informatisation methods have spurred tremendous progress in developing the next generation of manufacturing technology. Today, we are on the cusp of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In 2013, amongst one of 10 'Future Projects' identified by the German government as part of its High-Tech Strategy 2020 Action Plan, the Industry 4.0 project is considered to be a major endeavour for Germany to establish itself as a leader of integrated industry. In 2014, China's State Council unveiled their ten-year national plan, Made-in-China 2025, which was designed to transform China from the world's workshop into a world manufacturing power. Made-in-China 2025 is an initiative to comprehensively upgrade China's industry including the manufacturing sector. In Industry 4.0 and Made-in-China 2025, many applications require a combination of recently emerging new technologies, which is giving rise to the emergence of Industry 4.0. Such technologies originate from different disciplines including cyber-physical Systems, IoT, cloud computing, Industrial Integration, Enterprise Architecture, SOA, Business Process Management, Industrial Information Integration and others. At this present moment, the lack of powerful tools still poses a major obstacle for exploiting the full potential of Industry 4.0. In particular, formal methods and systems methods are crucial for realising Industry 4.0, which poses unique challenges. In this paper, we briefly survey the state of the art in the area of Industry 4.0 as it relates to industries.