Industry 4.0 to leverage automation, AI and data

It is difficult to pin down precisely how Industry 4.0 will affect automotive manufacturing operations, but stakeholders in the industry are investing heavily – or at least making plans – to prepare for what is considered as an inevitability.

By 2020, Bosch expects the benefits of Industry 4.0 to increase its sales by more than €1bn (US$1.23bn). Today, the German supplier’s industrial subsidiary, Bosch Rexroth, is playing a key role in the development of Industry 4.0 by working on ‘fully-connected’ factories. Here, power will be consumed in a more efficient manner, and a network of connected machines will be able to operate independently thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) programming.