The online course “The Smart Factory and its implementation” aims to introduce the practitioner the benefits and risks associated to the Smart Factory, as well as a well-defined approach to design it.

The Smart Factory is an optimized manufacturing facility which can facilitate launching new products depending on market dynamics, is scalable enough to meet demand variation for existing products, is able to produce Finished Goods at least cost, has smart machines, sensors and robots which are seamlessly integrated with information system architecture to enable high level of automation in transaction processing and has real time analytics that helps in minimizing downtime and improving efficiency.

Despite the wide range of technologies exploited in a Smart Factory, its backbone are the human skills. It is not wrong to say that a Smart Factory is made by and for workers: they will supervise and optimize the production system, while hard and repetitive activities will be performed by the machines. Moreover, the decision making process will be supported by Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Analytics.

The key technologies will be quickly introduced, while concepts like Digital Twin and Discrete Event Simulation will be broadly discussed.

The Smart Factory implementation steps described in this course are as follows:

• The first part focuses on the implementation of the physical world, including infrastructures, reconfigurable production systems and factory layout;
• The second part focuses on the implementation of the virtual world, including IT infrastructures and main tools like multiphysics simulation;
• The third part focuses on the implementation of a Digital Twin, which is a digital copy of the real factory based on cyber-physical system.