Smart factory in Industry 4.0

The transformation from traditional manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing intrigues the profound and lasting effect on the future manufacturing worldwide. Industry 4.0 was proposed for advancing manufacturing to realize short product life cycles and extreme mass customization in a cost-efficient way. As the heart of Industry 4.0, smart factory integrates physical technologies and cyber technologies and makes the involved technologies more complex and precise in order to improve performance, quality, controllability, management, and transparency of manufacturing processes. So far, leading manufacturers have begun the journey toward implementing smart factory. However, most firms still lack insight into the challenges and resources for implementing smart factory. As such, this paper identifies the requirements and key challenges, investigates available new technologies, reviews existing studies that have been done for smart factory, and further provides guidance for manufacturers to implementing smart factory in the context of Industry 4.0.