Cyber-Physische Produktion

Cyber-Physical Production: Models and Enactment of the Smart Factory 

This paper reconstructs the development of a smart factory demonstrator in a large corporation. It shows how the associated social and technical challenges were dealt with in practice, and how a particular vision of the smart factory was staged and enacted in demonstrations that addressed an expert public. The demonstrator presents an attempt at prototyping a largely automated factory in which robots and other “smart” production machines assemble small devices by following product “recipes” in a self-organizing and decentralized manner. Conducted from the perspective of practice-oriented Science and Technology Studies (STS), our ethnographic investigation is equally concerned with issues of social organization and technical processes. We show that demonstrators, understood as models of future smart factories, have multiple purposes. The purposes identified are: to examine the promises associated with the Industry 4.0-vision in a real production environment in view of feasibility and plausibility; to exploit the demonstrator project as a learning environment within the corporation; and to render concrete the vision of a smart factory. This final purpose takes into account the concerns of both system developers and potential customers of intelligent production machines.This paper reconstructs the development of a smart factory demonstrator in a large corporation. It shows how the associated social and technical challenges were dealt with in practice, and how a particular vision of the smart factory was staged and enacted in demonstrations that addressed an expert public. The demonstrator presents an attempt at prototyping a largely automated factory in which robots and other “smart” production machines assemble small devices by following product “recipes” in a self-organizing and decentralized manner. Conducted from the perspective of practice-oriented Science and Technology Studies (STS), our ethnographic investigation is equally concerned with issues of social organization and technical processes. We show that demonstrators, understood as models of future smart factories, have multiple purposes. The purposes identified are: to examine the promises associated with the Industry 4.0-vision in a real production environment in view of feasibility and plausibility; to exploit the demonstrator project as a learning environment within the corporation; and to render concrete the vision of a smart factory. This final purpose takes into account the concerns of both system developers and potential customers of intelligent production machines.