Abstract:

The fourth industrial revolution which is characterized by the increasing digitization and interconnection of products, value chains and business models has arrived in the industrial sector. The essence of the Industry 4.0 vision is the ubiquitous connection of people, things and machines. By connecting devices and sensors to the Internet, we are entering an era of data analytics, connectivity, and automation that creates innovations and progress previously out of reach. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the key technology which offers businesses an opportunity to increase automation, improve data processing and data analytics, speed up processes and improve performance. IoT is thus an attractive tool applicable to any organization, regardless of its size or type, or industry it operates.

The term IoT has become pervasive with the vision of a massively instrumented world of intelligent inputs and outputs (e.g. analog, digital, video, audio) communicating through Internet data communications concepts and technologies. There is a broad range of emerging IoT applications in various areas of modern economy including, but not limited to health care, traffic control, vehicle safety, energy, agriculture and manufacturing. As a subset of IoT, Industrial IoT (IIoT) covers the domains of machine-to-machine (M2M) and industrial communication technologies with automation applications. IIoT paves the way to better understanding of the manufacturing process, thereby enabling efficient and sustainable production.

The paper explains the concepts of IoT, Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0. It also highlights the opportunities, risks and challenges associated with their implementation and usage, and presents areas of application.