Technological Trends in Context of Industry 4.0 and Their Industrial Applications

In the course of the fourth industrial revolution, a rapid technological change takes place in the production industry. Numerous new technologies and multiple opportunities for industrial applications emerge. These already lead to a fundamental change in industry. In order to keep pace with this development, companies are forced to cope with this new technologies and arising technology trends. At the same time the progressive increase in the amount of available and potentially relevant knowledge exacerbate the identification, evaluation and interpretation of new technologies. Thus a transparent and structured overview of new technologies and technology trends including the evaluation of readiness and industrial impact is required. In this context, the Fraunhofer IPT and EPIC CoE work on a systematic technology trend scouting in order to identify relevant future changes and possible opportunities for production industry. Based on existing concepts in technology intelligence, a procedure for systematic trend scouting of technology trends in context of Industry 4.0 and their industrial applications was developed and initialized. The identified sub trends are visualized in fact sheets and aggregated in a web-based trend radar. Within the first scouting period 52 sub trends where identified, elaborated and evaluated according their readiness level for industrial application and impact on the current production industry.