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Industry 4.0 follows the goal of promoting digitalization of manufacturing. Thereby converging information technologies and automation play a crucial role. These goals do not only require new softwares and information models but also require hardwares that offer more intelligence and bring more agility in production systems. The current developments in field of sensors introducing sensor 4.0 is an example of adapting the hardwares to industry 4.0 requirements. This is also necessary for other participating hardwares such as control devices. The control devices must be also designed to act more intelligent and provide interfaces to the other technologies like cloud computing and Cyber Physical Systems. In this paper, a new architecture for control devices will be introduced that operates as a bridge between industrial automation applications and IT technologies and provides a virtual platform for tests and simulations that run parallel to the control procedure. We refer to this architecture as “PLC 4.0”.
Azarmipour et al. (2019) studied this question.