The world of advanced manufacturing has now reached the fourth industrial revolution, a process which will result in fully automated and interconnected industrial production as a logical outcome of smart manufacturing.
The new digital technologies will have a decisive impact in the context of the use of data and of analytics: once data have been gathered, value must be extracted from them. Today only 1% of data collected is actually utilised by businesses, whereas instead they could increase their own levels of efficiency thanks to “machine learning”, that is to say from machines which perfect their performance by “learning” from data gathered bit by bit and then analysed.
Total efficiency, process integration, digitalisation, data analytics: these are therefore the keys to building the Smart factory of the future. The challenge is to increase the levels of manufacturing, organisational, managerial and energy efficiency by achieving the highest possible degree of productivity for the process and of quality for the product