The fourth industrial revolution or industry 4.0 means a new era of our factories characterized by automation, connectivity, and digitalization. Many manufacturers will have to adapt to this new environment if they want to be competitive. The European Union has already set up a public-private partnership called "Factories of the Future".

The initiative is a boost for the manufacturing industry to face the future characterized by a new technological and environmental scenario. It's about making the most of the opportunities offered by Industry 4.0. This new scenario also imposes new rules of competitiveness that involve the manufacture of high value-added products that respond in an agile and efficient way to the demands of a constantly changing market. It is this adaptation that will allow these companies to continue to play an important role in a dynamic and often global production network.

The factories of the future are focused on digitizing their processes, making the most of new production technologies, as well as managing energy and materials in an increasingly circular way. Alongside technological innovation and sustainability, social innovation is also a top priority, a process that involves focusing on personal involvement, creativity and autonomy of teams and individual employees.

The concept of Digital Twins is gaining more and more ground in the transition to Industry 4.0. These are "living" digital representations of devices and processes that make up a factory through the use of the latest advances in Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and learning techniques based on Big Data. With live information from a plant, the history of operations and maintenance, and the application of machine learning techniques, it is possible to obtain a high-precision model whose behaviour closely resembles that of the real system.

This results in a protected and safe environment for experimentation, ideal for detecting problems before they occur, planning maintenance tasks to avoid unexpected shutdowns, building new, more efficient operating scenarios, developing new business opportunities and new manufacturing plans, or even making forecasts for the future.

Ultimately, a digital twin helps people and organizations make decisions based on higher-quality information, saving them time and ultimately reducing costs.