Roundtable report: Getting to grips with Industry 4.0

Engineering is a discipline that thrives — indeed, depends completely — on precision. If you can’t define your terms, then it’s going to be very difficult to complete your task, or to communicate it to the team that is almost inevitably going to be working on it. So it was somewhat disconcerting to convene our recent roundtable discussion on Industry 4.0 in the salubrious surroundings of a book-lined room at London’s Royal Institution and to find that none of the invited participants could agree on a definition of what Industry 4.0 actually is.

“Is it really anything?” asked editor Jon Excell. “Is it a definable concept or is it a group of technologies?”

It might be useful here to look at the Wikipedia definition of Industry 4.0, which says it’s a collection of technologies and concepts for defining and operating ‘Smart Factories’, where the machinery of manufacturing – machine tools, the sensors monitoring them and suchlike – can communicate with each other, with the systems overseeing the factory and the people who work in it to fine-tune the manufacturing process and enable such things as product customisation, while increasing productivity and flexibility.