One step towards an industry 4.0 component

One research and development direction towards flexible production systems is coded under the term Industry 4.0. It envisions a production system component with increased flexibility and networking capabilities usable to implement production systems with increased self abilities. Independent of the fact that there are several activities to develop an all-embracing Industry 4.0 component architecture and its demonstration by a prototype, practitioners call for a first possibility to implement an Industry 4.0 component based on existing technologies and to provide a migration path from existing production system architectures to Industry 4.0 systems. The aim of this paper is to represent a first attempt towards an Industry 4.0 component implementation using existing standardized technologies.