INDUSTRY 4.0: AN OVERVIEW

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is a new level of value chain organization and management, which is likely to change the way processes, supply chain, and business models operate, which is why many companies are evaluating the concepts and applications synthesized under the term Industry 4.0 to develop their own business strategies, which under this new industrial disruption, which is founded on some basic principles such as interoperability, virtualization, decentralization, real-time capabilities, service orientation, etc., and where there are, for example, smart factories capable of creating virtual copies of the physical world, monitoring physical processes, self-managing, optimizing, and making decisions autonomously in real time. The need to integrate processes within enterprise between ERP and shop-floor level and also across enterprise boundaries for optimal and collaborative environment, to highlight the importance of real time information access in order to make decision and to show the importance of predictive maintenance in a production environment prompted this research. Information obtained from industries were analyzed. The results however, showed that industry 4.0, if fully adopted would increase production of goods and services and also save time consumed during production stage.