Market readiness and technology maturity/applicability of key technologies

Source: IEC- factory of the Future

Market readiness and technology maturity/applicability of key technologies

Most  of  the  key  technologies  for  factories  of the   future  are   still   under development.   Their   maturity   and   applicability in  different  industries,  as  well  as  the  readiness to  adopt  them  in  manufacturing  industries,  are indicated in Figure. From this radar plot it can be seen that in particular  non-technical challenges such as migration strategies or the implementation of a system  perspective  are  still  at  a  premature  stage.  This  is well  in  line  with  the  observation  that  many  of  the development  activities  in  the  context  of  factories of  the  future  that  are  ongoing  at  the  regional,  national  and  international  levels  are  focusing  on technological issues.

The  adoption  of  key  technologies  varies  among  industries  and  application  cases. For  instance,  additive   manufacturing   is   appraised   as   being   highly    beneficial    for    personalized production    and  manufacturing  of  special  parts,  which,  for  example,   have   complex   geometries expensive   or   impossible   to   manufacture   using   common   manufacturing  technologies.  On  the other  side,  additive  manufacturing  probably  will  never  reach  the  degree  of  efficiency  it  already  has  for current  mass    production.    Similarly,    the    maturity    of    modelling  and  simulation  tools  depends  on the  area  of  application.  They  are  already  widely  used  for  product  development  and  optimization, e.g.  in  the  automotive  and  aerospace  industry,  while  there  is  improvement  potential  for  close-to-real-time  simulation  applications  for  optimization  of  manufacturing settings.

For  other  technologies  such  as  IoT  technologies,  M2M  networks,  smart  robotics  and  cloud-based  AIM,   singular  solutions exist  which   are   quite  mature in their specific application field. However, further efforts have to be undertaken to implement wide-spread  applicability  of  such  developments  by  overcoming  issues  which are  inhibiting  their  market   readiness,   such   as   the   “resistance   to   change” or a lack of migration strategies.

Altogether, it can be said that the industry branch, as well as the application context, i.e. the position in   the   horizontal   and   vertical   manufacturing   environment   layers,   impact   the   market  and   deployment  readiness  of  factory  of  the  future  applications