How are we preparing for Industry 4.0?

When the concept of Industry 4.0 was first announced in Germany, this industrial revolution started growing from the theoretical concepts to real-word applications.

The change that this industrial revolution will bring will affect most of our lives, therefore many countries are preparing for it through policies, national strategies and research and development plans that will help overcome the challenges, but also grab the opportunities that are coming our way.

Since the concept on Industry 4.0 is still quite new there are no clear standards according to which it could be implemented. Therefore, each country is implementing it differently based on the needs of its market and industry specifications.

The European Union is also encouraging research into the field of smart technologies with research programmes that offer funding like “Horizon Europe”.

There are certain issues and challenges that are coming with Industry 4.0 and they  mostly concern the lack of autonomy in many current systems, lack of bandwidth in a majority of the current network protocols, the need to ensure the quality and the integrity of the data recoded, making modelling and analysis satisfactory for practical purposes and the need to adjust current production routes.

And let us not forget the critical issue of cyber security (which will be approached in one of our next articles).

With all these issues in mind, most of the developed countries are investing in research and development either though substantial government founding or through incentives for the industry to invest in its future.

If you are interested in knowing how countries are preparing for the Industry 4.0 revolution and what are their programs and plans for the future, you should read this article.


Author
European Startup Network