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58 SMT Magazine • March 2015 During the age of computer-controlled pro- duction sequences, abbreviations like CAM, CAD and CNC are a common part of manufac- turing reality. When the term "Industry 4.0" made its first public appearance at the 2011 Hanover Trade Fair, the associated content was new to only a certain extent. The targeted re- sults of the "4th industrial revolution" are now commonplace at many companies in the high- tech industries—and they're undergoing con- tinuous further development. The idea of globally networked production processes by means of which machines com- municate with each other directly via the Inter- net of Things (IoT) and forward data acquired with sensors and learn from each other at first sounds like science fiction. Nevertheless, many of the factors which are seen as prerequisites for Industry 4.0 are already a reality. And the reas- suring news is that it doesn't (yet) work without human involvement. Industry is already working with highly complex, computer-aided, and to a much great- er extent, computer-controlled processes. CNC milling machines are highly precise CAD pro- grams that convert 2D plans into 3D models— from materials management, planning and pro- duction, right on up to sales logistics, none of these sequences would be conceivable without a computer. However, combining them is new. Data from processes which were logged and processed sep- arately in the past are now collected at central computers, where they're evaluated and com- bined by complex software systems. Entire se- quences can be fully monitored and controlled in this way. And this will now be followed by global networking of the machines? Development of an Industry 4.0 standard is a harmonization process (i.e., worldwide stan- dardization of technical data communication). The unmanageable amounts of data resulting from industrial data collection at various com- panies, which accumulate on a daily basis, the so-called big data, would have to be channeled and prepared in order to be made available as by markus mittermair rehM TherMAl SYSTeMS Industry 4.0 Initiatives artICle