Industry 4.0 – or, more specifically, aerospace 4.0 – is a hot topic at the moment. But what does it actually mean? We asked Digital Catapult’s Christian Beck.

Beck said: “We’ve probably got a little obsessed with defining these things and it leads us to dive into the technologies, which is often an area the established businesses aren’t entirely comfortable with actually. I think it’ll self-define and we probably don’t need to worry too much about the label because as these things are adopted it will become clear to everyone what we want it to mean and what it does mean.”

He added: “ We should focus a bit more on the capabilities we want it to enable than the label on the technologies themselves. If you think about what we want [the technology] to do – talking about things like zero accidents, zero faults, zero production faults –essentially no design, just requirements in the beginning. Then work from there, back to where the opportunities are to deploy solutions now and what does the roadmap look like to get us to that ultimate ‘capability panacea’.”

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