Abstract—Companies are facing increased pressure to reduce costs, improve manufacturing performance, and to offer new products and services. Industrial competition demands to offer individualized products and integration of stakeholders in a complete spectrum ranging from customer interaction till production level. In order to enable it, new methods, tools and technologies have to be introduced in enterprises especially at production level. In this paper, we define and explain the term industry 4.0 and a future scenario namely predictive maintenance. To bridge the gap between current production environments and future environments, we describe what is required from technical, technological and human resource perspective? We also provide an approach to solve current pain points and to do preparation to achieve benefits from industry 4.0.

Index Terms—industry 4.0, future manufacturing, IoT, smart manufacturing

Cite: Ateeq Khan and Klaus Turowski, "A Preliminary Study on Industry 4.0," Journal of Industrial and Intelligent Information, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 230-234, May 2016. doi: 10.18178/jiii.4.3.230-234