Smart connected digital factories

Traditional manufacturing has been characterized by limited data exchange between systems, machines and processes throughout the product development life cycle. Recent initiatives such as the Industrial IoT, or Industry 4.0, as it has been dubbed, are fundamentally reshaping the industrial landscape by promoting connected manufacturing solutions that realize a “digital thread” which connects all aspects of manufacturing including all data and operations involved in the production of goods and services. This paper focuses on Industry 4.0 technologies and how they how they support the emergence of highly-connected, knowledge-enabled factories, referred to as Smart Manufacturing Networks. These comprise an ecosystem of connected factory sites, plants, and self-regulating machines able to customize output, allocate resources over manufacturing clouds optimally to offer a seamless transition between the physical and digital worlds of product design and production. These sophisticated capabilities are possible today because technologies facilitating the IoT and data analytics engines are mature and can be implemented at scale, thanks to pervasive connectivity, sensors, cloud computing, and storage.