Industry 4.0

WHAT IS 4.0 INDUSTRY

4.0 Industry originates from the fourth Industrial Revolution. There is not a clear definition of it yet, but in a nutshell some analysts tend to describe it as a process that will lead to a completely automated and interconnected industrial production.

According to a recent report of McKinsey Consultancy Multinational Company, the new digital technologies will have a profound impact on the market in four possible ways: the first concerns the use of data, calculus power and connectivity, and corresponds to big data, open data, Internet of Things, machine-to-machine and cloud computing for the centralization of information and its storage.

The second one is that of analytics: when data has been collected, it is necessary to get some value out of it. At present, only 1% of the collected data is used by companies, which could gain from “machine learning”, that is to say from the machines which can improve their performance by “learning” from the data that are gradually gathered and analysed.

The third possible line of development is interaction between man and machine, which involves increasingly widespread “touch” interfaces and increased reality: for example, the possibility to improve your performance at work by using tools such as Google Glass. Finally, there is the sector that deals with the passage from digital to “real”, which comprises additive manufacturing, 3D print, robotics, communication, the machine-to-machine interaction and the new technologies to storage and use energy in a targeted way so as to rationalize costs and optimize the performance.