Essential Manufacturing

29Introduction

This book has provided an overview of the essentials of manufacturing industry. However, although the basic concepts have remained fairly constant; for example, forging metals for directional strength properties or minimising the time from product design to market; it is worth concluding with a comment on a few of the relatively recent concepts and technologies that are having a strong impact on the industry. It should be understood that advances in technology will continue so that what is regarded as the present will certainly be regarded as historical very soon, the comments relating to the future are entirely speculative.

Two closely related terms are widely used today to convey the current state of manufacturing, these are Industry 4.0 and The Fourth Industrial Revolution. In one respect it can be said that the only Industrial Revolution was the one that started in the eighteenth century, see Chapter 2, and everything since then has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. However, the terms serve here as a framework for describing some relatively recent developments that are significantly influencing manufacturing industry. Originally used in Germany near the beginning of the twenty‐first century the term Industry 4.0 relates to the integration of cyber‐physical systems (CPSs), the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Services in order to create Smart Factories. The term fourth Industrial Revolution is in more general usage and is similar to Industry ...