We have already seen so much about industry 4.0 and especially the technologies that drive the most advanced technological changes in the field of industry. So now we will see what smart factories are and how all those technologies are used together to make factories smart and produce smart manufacturing.
So smart factories are all the advanced technologies like IoT, AI, robots, etc. are combined to make the existing factories work smarter, faster and communicate between machines, self-optimize their performance and learn from their environment that is fully automatized and have intelligent network systems in real-time and then self adapt and also autonomously run whole production process without the need of any human beings and provide accurate and less wastage of production.
To achieve smart factories, we need smart machinery, smart people trained for it, smart manufactories processes (like dynamism, automation, real-time work, and more efficiency), innovations, and also when we talk about smartness we need cloud systems and big data and, a smart grid which are the important aspects of smart factories and all of this will lead to smart products that are customer friendly. We need smart factories for the evaluation of technologies, highly competitive markets, a high amount of production in a minimal timeline, and also to reduce the risk of failure.
Smart factories also reduce the cost of production and manufacturing, increase efficiency, optimization (like task scheduling, uses of energy, cost of production, tracking, throughput, reliability), transparency (like real-time monitoring, taking the required action on time, generating alert messages on time, and real-time tracking), proactivity (like predicting the quality issues, improving safety, forecasting the future outcomes, and predicting the future challenges), agility (like flexibility, adaptation, and future challenges), make connection flows easy, helps in improving the qualities according to customer demands, increase predictability with the help of big data and also provide higher security. Smart machines can self-communicate between machines or other machines or with humans too.
