A Research Setup Demonstrating Flexible Industry 4.0 Production

The recent Industry 4.0 (I4.0) initiative has a heavy focus on enabling flexible production, such that production systems can react dynamically and cost-effectively to respond to market needs. For this reason, we need demonstration facilities to advance research within the I4.0 production and promote advanced production processes for industries. This paper aims to introduce a setup that we have developed for our University’s I4.0 Laboratory (I4.0 lab) that enables advanced and flexible experiments in terms of use-cases for advanced production processes and experiments with both robotics and automated production solutions and software. The presented work is part of a more extensive constructive research process and our experience with setting up an advanced cell-based production line. The contribution of the paper is 1) the analysis of requirements for an I4.0 research platform, 2) a model for an I4.0 laboratory, 3) the application of the constructive research method to the I4.0 laboratory, 4) a proposal for a concrete research setup, and 5) outlining further research questions, experiments, and projects that can be based on the setup.