Smart Factory

A smart factory is a highly digitalized and networked production facility that works with technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, analytics, big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) and can run largely autonomously. The key features of the smart factory are therefore

• Transparency
• Connectivity
• Autonomy

The extensive use of IoT sensors and devices connects machines and provides insight into their condition and factory processes, creating an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Increasingly sophisticated analytics and applications based on AI and machine learning are taking over many of the routine tasks, allowing employees to focus on handling exceptions and making higher level decisions. Robots are expected to populate smart factories for routine work and collaborate with humans.

The intelligent factory for individual products

The smart factory also refers to a production facility in which production can take place with minimal human intervention thanks to the most advanced technologies. In this way, production can be individualized. Until now, batch size 1, i.e. the profitable manufacture of individual products, was more a matter of laborious manual work, which costs more time and money and can hardly keep pace with rising demand. The concept of the factory of the future shows how batch size 1 can be made profitable in the future. The intelligent factory makes it possible to meet the demand for personal product customization and still produce mass quantities at low cost. The concept of such a factory has, of course, long been pursued by some large companies in the automotive industry. Leather seats, optional loudspeakers and countless different colors. Even today, a new car quickly becomes unique. But there is still no such thing as a fully autonomous production facility.