The 4.0 factory: Fully automated and very, very smart

So, what is this huge change about and why do some people identify it as a genuine revolution? If we follow the theorists’ main assumptions, it is not single and brilliant innovations that will decide our future productive processes, but the meeting of all those developments carried out during the last decades and still to come. In that sense, this trend represents a paradigm shift, instead of one more step in the frenzied technological race.

We can be sure about one thing: In our current 4.0 factories, automation is already being carried out by cyber-physical systems, made possible by the internet of things and cloud computing systems. These cyber-physical systems combine both physical and tangible machinery with digital processes, acquiring the capacity to make decentralized decisions and cooperate with humans, through the evolving technology developed around the internet of things.