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.