What the Smart City in the Danube Region Can Learn From Industry 4.0

Abstract

The Smart City Concept throughout all its current definitions is essentially a system that uses state-of-the-art ICT to provide and process information, to adapt and learn. The Internet of Things and advances in affordable sensor technology play an additional important role. The net result of the “smartification” of a city is the creation of a living, networked system of assets, devices and infrastructure. This living system continuously collects data that enables the system to learn and evolve.

This is nothing new or path-breaking. In logistics and the manufacturing industry, this concept has been widely implemented to optimise supply chains, from predictive maintenance, to dynamic route optimisation and online business intelligence (BI). “Industry 4.0” has evolved from a buzzword to everyday reality. Moreover, these technologies do not just “electrify” existing processes – they enable new processes and beyond that even completely new business models that would not have been feasible with the pre-Industry-4.0 technology. Particularly the advent of in-memory business analytics that enables BI from the original transaction data in an on-demand/online fashion has facilitated this development. Now, the public sector is discovering these technologies for its own purposes.

This contribution attempts to show the parallelism, but also differences between smart cities and Industry 4.0, where learning effects may occur and known pitfalls may be avoided.