Big data analysis to ease interconnectivity in industry 4.0—A smart factory perspective

Thriving and challenging market trends led to changes in the manufacturing industry. Production lines that need to adapt to customisable products on the fly emerged. By applying communication and sensors to the shop-floor, along with Industry 4.0 principles, this became a possibility. The growing amount of sensors led to an exponential boom of the amount of data available, creating the concept of Smart Factory. By applying Big Data Analysis to this data, it may be possible to optimise Smart Factories. There are technologies capable of doing this, even though only some are capable of guaranteeing Smart Factory requirements, such as real-time. A study of these technologies, based on SME’s experts’ opinion, is hereby presented to assess the most suitable ones to analyse Big Data in a Smart Factory environment.