Data-driven automation. Production: a dynamic challenge

Most manufacturing is not mass production. If it were, hard automation - the inflexible turning out of hundreds of thousands or even millions of identical parts - could handle most needs. But even in the United States, the world's largest center of mass production, 75 percent of the parts produced by metal-working, for example, are in lots of less than 50 pieces. What is needed here and in most manufacturing is flexible automation - automation that can handle a large and constantly changing variety of produced items.