Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is the next generation of industrial automation, allowing the affiliates to optimize their factories and augment their production process with the interconnectivity of industrial equipment and increasing computation. The Fourth Industrial Revolution conceptualizes rapid change in technology, industries, societal patterns and processes in the 21st century which is due to increasing interconnectivity and smart automation. It is a new chapter in industrial development, empowered by extraordinary technological advances commensurate with those of the first, second, and third industrial revolutions. These advances are converging the physical, digital, and living worlds in ways that create both huge promises and potential peril. It is more than just a technology-driven change; it is an opportunity to help the stakeholders harness converging technologies to create an inclusive, human-centered future to achieve sustainability. Interoperability, information transparency, technical assistance, and decentralized decisions are the basic principles of establishing Industry 4.0. Figure 1 provides the insights of same in identifying and implementing Industry 4.0. IoT facilitates the devices to communicate with each other, leading to the creation of a virtual copy of physical world data. This assists the operators to visualize/analyze the related process involved and eventually making decisions on their own to perform tasks as autonomously as possible.

Industry 4.0 is regarded as a series of disruptive and ever-growing innovations in production and leaps in industrial processes with the objective of achieving excellence in terms of productivity, safety, and related cost involved. Various key enabling technologies are being practiced in the industrial arena for the same (Figure 2).

From improving production and quality to related safety and cost involved, Industry 4.0 has created solutions for day-to-day industrial problems. It has demonstrated various paradigms for asset utilization and resource-energy optimization. Figure 3 summarizes some of the major add-ons which can be achieved through industry 4.0.