The Disruptive Power of Machine Learning and IoT in Automation Industry

In the past decades the automation industry was evolving at modest pace, mainly driven by innovations in mechanical design and utilizing basic principles from physics or chemistry. What was already known was continuously improved and aspects like requirements for environmental and human protection increased over the years and were more and more formalized leading i.e. to complex procedures for safety designs. The innovations of the IT world which continuously gained speed especially over the last decade were taken over rather reluctantly. But recent trends show a growing push of IT technologies into every field of industrial application, frequently named as industry 4.0 or 4th industrial revolution. We will look at opportunities and threads created by the technological changes, touch preconditions for success and pitfalls for failure. Analyzing the past trends of both IT and industrial automation will allow us for some astonishing predictions for the next decade.