We are looking back on an eventful trade fair: this year’s Hannover Messe has ended last Friday, April 29, 2016, after five successful days.
Especially the visit of the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, and our Chancellor Angela Merkel generated media and public interest. The selection of this year’s partner country fell on the largest economy in the world, the USA. In order to be able to strengthen their domestic industry, the United States especially focus on the topic of Industrie 4.0 with all of its facets.

The SmartFactoryKL, the DFKI and 18 renowned industry partners have used the trade fair to illustrate their vision of Industrie 4.0 to the interested expert audience. The world’s first manufacturer-independent Industrie 4.0 demonstrator shows the core paradigms of a digitalized factory and is currently the most developed demonstrator on the topic. In the meantime, the project has developed into market-ready technologies. As the central Industrie 4.0 exhibit of the Hannover Messe, the plant emphasized that joint cooperation of different manufacturers promises the greatest success: the complete interoperability and modularity of the demonstrator enables a flexible and efficient production and simultaneously creates a manufacturer-independent platform. The growing number of new partners is certainly an indicator of the success of the concept. Currently, there are 18 industry partners: Belden-Hirschmann, CISCO, EPLAN, FESTO, HARTING, IBM, iTAC, Lapp Kabel, Mettler Toledo, MiniTec, Pilz, Phoenix Contact, ProAlpha, Bosch Rexroth, SAP, TÜV Süd, TE Connectivity and Weidmüller. The result of the joint development: we have already realized important aspects of the factory of tomorrow today – Plug&Produce, Predictive Maintenance, Scalable Automation, Failure-Proof Maintenance and Worker Support. Besides the work of the technology initiative, the image film of the SmartFactoryKL, first published at the trade fair, illuminates this added value of Industrie 4.0.

Many visitors from the industry, politics, press and science visited us at the stand and showed interest in our work. We were particularly able to educate small and medium-sized companies with the Mittelstand 4.0 Competence Center Kaiserslautern and win them for further exchange. This way, the SmartFactoryKL network has been even more solidified.