“The term Industry 4.0 stands for the fourth industrial revolution. Best understood as a new level of organisation and control over the entire value chain of the life cycle of products, it is geared towards increasingly individualised customer requirements. This cycle begins at the product idea, covers the order placement and extends through to development and manufacturing, all the way to the product delivery for the end customer, and concludes with recycling, encompassing all resultant services. The basis for the fourth industrial revolution is
the availability of all relevant information in real time by connecting all instances involved in the value chain. The ability to derive the optimal value-added flow at any time from the data is also vital. The connection of people, things and systems creates dynamic, self-organising, real-time optimised valueadded connections within and across companies. These can be optimised according to different criteria such as costs, availability and consumption of resources.”