In the Factory of the Future, digital manufacturing processes will be automated and flexibly linked! The Internet of Things, analysis and artificial intelligence will improve effi ciency and maintenance and even minimize downtime. Design, production processes and material flows will be optimized through the use of Virtual Reality. New relationships will emerge between people and machines. Productivity and quality will signifi cantly increase. Industry 4.0 will become highly efficient and sustainable. With increasing automation and digitization, production plants are becoming more and more complex and due to a shortage of skilled workers, the control panels need to be simplified and supplemented by assistance systems.
Intralogistics represents a major challenge, especially for existing operations with a lack of space. Here it must be assumed that in the future, goods will no longer be retrieved by humans, but transported automatically to the end users. However, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution as solutions will have to be individually adapted to the respective operation and process conditions.