The increase in the competitiveness of our manufacturing and services industry will have to go through the growing integration of “cyber-physical systems” (cyber-physical systems or CPS) in industrial and logistic processes.
La "future factory" it will in fact be increasingly governed by a system in which intelligent machines connected to the internet will be inserted into the jobs performed by human beings: the assembly line will be replaced by a network of machines which will not only produce more and with fewer errors, but will be able to change independently the production schemes according to the external inputs that they receive even remotely, and in the meantime maintain a high efficiency.
Le digital technologies, equipped with all the devices to connect to the Internet and to other "smart" objects, and applied to industrial automation, will revolutionize production processes.
The real-time availability of enormous masses of information, drawn from Big Data, the IoT, al Cloud, will make it possible to monitor the flow of demand, adjust production levels, reduce lead times, optimize warehouse stocks.
With the introduction of digital technologies in the factory, the plants and means of work will also change with machinery destined to be increasingly standard, because the different productions will be directed by specific software, easy to reprogram.
- workers, now transformed into managers and technicians of technological systems, will intervene only in the event of malfunctions, notified directly by "smart" devices and, thanks to the 5G network, will be able to remotely manage interventions with a computer.
The result will be that tomorrow's factories will be less complex and more flexible. Moreover, even if the factory will increasingly be a capital intensive space, the worker will remain at the center of the system and will have an increasingly strategic role.
Entrusted to heavy and repetitive jobs to innovative machinery and robots, workers will interact with new technologies in a synergistic way and in complete safety, helping to create ever greater value for production.
In traditional factory the separation between the simple and repetitive activities, entrusted to the workers, and the other complex activities, which are the responsibility of the hierarchical line, are clear, while in the future factory traditional hierarchical structures and organizational complexity, by definition unproductive and harmful, are dismantled, replacing them with an organization that gives space to personal acquaintances and interaction between workers. thanks to the accessibility of technical and process information in the various forms of the Internet.
The factory of tomorrow will be a better environment in which to work, where the involvement of workers widens the basis of their participation in production processes, effectively shifting the organizational culture towards cooperation, favoring the acquisition of high-level skills and allowing the optimization of the production processes themselves.
