Industry 4.0+: The Next Level of Intelligent and Self-optimizing Factories

For almost a decade now, production science has been dealing with Industry 4.0. In recent years, a large number of technological innovations have been developed and introduced into practice, enabling the implementation of smart and connected manufacturing systems. Over the next years, researchers and practitioners will face new challenges in Industry 4.0 to achieve the original vision of an intelligent and self-optimizing factory. We are currently at a crossroads between the first level of Industry 4.0, which was characterized by technologically driven innovations, and a future level of Industry 4.0+, which will be based on data-driven innovation. This article introduces these two phases of Industry 4.0 and gives a direction of research trends with growing attention in manufacturing science and practice. In the context of Industry 4.0+, two research directions, in particular, are expected to generate groundbreaking changes in production and its environment. This is, on the one hand, the introduction of Artificial Intelligence into manufacturing and on the other hand the use of nature as inspiration in the form of Biological Transformation.