"In recent years, tech companies such as Google and Facebook have rocked the world as they have seemingly revolutionized the culture of work. We've all heard stories of lounges outfitted with ping pong tables, kitchens with kombucha on tap, and other amenities that supposedly foster creative thinking. Nothing could seem further from earlier workplaces associated with a different revolution in capitalism: factories, in which employees are required to perform highly circumscribed tasks as quickly as possible to meet quotas--for next to no pay. However, as Moritz Altenried shows in The Digital Factory, these types of workplaces are not so far from the Googleplex as we might think. While recent accounts of the transformation of labor after the demise of the factory highlight the creative, communicative, immaterial, or artistic features of contemporary labor, Altenried uncovers the factory-like conditions in which many new digital workers perform their jobs. These workers, such as video game testers, social media content moderators, and Amazon fulfillment center workers, perform highly repetitive, unskilled tasks for low and often contingent wages. Based on more than five years of research in different sites using ethnography and interviews combined with an analysis of infrastructural technologies, Altenried's book gives us a first-hand account of many new forms of digital labor that drive contemporary capitalism. He shows that though today's factories might look and feel different than they did 150 years ago, they still follow the same logics and produce the same unequal outcomes"--

This volume provides a unique collection of mathematical tools and industrial case studies in digital manufacturing. It addresses various topics, ranging from models of single production technologies, production lines, logistics and workflows to models and optimization strategies for energy consumption in production. The digital factory represents a network of digital models and simulation and 3D visualization methods for the holistic planning, realization, control and ongoing improvement of all factory processes related to a specific product. In the past ten years, all industrialized countries have launched initiatives to realize this vision, sometimes also referred to as Industry 4.0 (in Europe) or Smart Manufacturing (in the United States). Its main goals are • reconfigurable, adaptive and evolving factories capable of small-scale production • high-performance production, combining flexibility, productivity, precision and zero defects • energy and resource efficiency in manufacturing None of these goals can be achieved without a thorough modeling of all aspects of manufacturing together with a multi-scale simulation and optimization of process chains; in other words, without mathematics. To foster collaboration between mathematics and industry in this area the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI) founded a special interest group on Math for the Digital Factory (M4DiFa). This book compiles a selection of review papers from the M4DiFa kick-off meeting held at the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics in Berlin, Germany, in May 2014. The workshop aimed at bringing together mathematicians working on modeling, simulation and optimization with researchers and practitioners from the manufacturing industry to develop a holistic mathematical view on digital manufacturing. This book is of interest to practitioners from industry who want to learn about important mathematical concepts, as well as to scientists who want to find out about an exciting new area of application that is of vital importance for today’s highly industrialized and high-wage countries.

The world progresses toward Industry 4.0, and manufacturers are challenged to successfully navigate this unique digital journey. To some, digitalization is a golden opportunity; to others, it is a necessary evil. But to optimist and pessimist alike, there is a widespread puzzlement over the practical details of digitalization. To many manufacturers, digital transformation is a vague and confusing concept they nevertheless must grapple with in order to survive the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The proliferation of digital manufacturing technologies adds to the confusion, leaving many manufacturers perplexed and unprepared, with little real insight into how emerging technologies can help them sustain a competitive edge in their markets. This book effectively conveys Siemens's knowledge and experience through a concept called "Smart Digital Manufacturing," a stepwise approach to realizing the promise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Smart Digital Manufacturing roadmap provides guidance and enables low-risk, high-reward adoption of new manufacturing software technologies through a series of tipping-point investment decisions that result in optimized manufacturing performance. The book provides readers with a clear understanding of what digital technology has to offer them, and how and when to invest in these essential components of tomorrow?s factories. René Wolf is Senior Vice President of Manufacturing Operations Management Software for Siemens Digital Industries Software, a business unit of the Siemens Digital Factory Division. Raffaello Lepratti is Vice President of Business Development and Marketing for Siemens Digital Industries Software.

The Digital Factoryreveals the hidden human labor that supports today’s digital capitalism. The workers of today’s digital factory include those in Amazon warehouses, delivery drivers, Chinese gaming workers, Filipino content moderators, and rural American search engine optimizers. Repetitive yet stressful, boring yet often emotionally demanding, these jobs require little formal qualification, but can demand a large degree of skills and knowledge. This work is often hidden behind the supposed magic of algorithms and thought to be automated, but it is in fact highly dependent on human labor. The workers of today’s digital factory are not as far removed from a typical auto assembly line as we might think. Moritz Altenried takes us inside today’s digital factories, showing that they take very different forms, including gig economy platforms, video games, and Amazon warehouses. As Altenried shows, these digital factories often share surprising similarities with factories from the industrial age. As globalized capitalism and digital technology continue to transform labor around the world, Altenried offers a timely and poignant exploration of how these changes are restructuring the social division of labor and its geographies as well as the stratifications and lines of struggle.

From Europe with "Industry 4.0" and from the US with "Smart Factory", the industrial model faces an unprecedented change. In this book we discover the 20 most important technologies that large companies are developing to continue dominating the market and thanks to which small and medium companies could increase their competitiveness and survive in a global market. This book, written in a language understandable to non-specialists, is intended to help as a navigation chart and compass, for all those who will face this fascinating challenge.IoT, AGV, RFID, RTLS, Additive Manufacturing, Collaborative Robots, PLM, Digital Twin, CPS, ... are some examples of the KETs (key enabling technologies) that we are going to show you.

This is a collection of papers presented at the 1st International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO). The papers focus on real world applications, covering three main themes: Intelligent Control Systems, Optimization, Robotics and Automation, Signal Processing, Systems Modeling and Control. The book will interest professionals in the areas of control and robotics.

The definitive history of America’s greatest incubator of innovation and the birthplace of some of the 20th century’s most influential technologies “Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . The Idea Factory explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?” —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review “Compelling . . . Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources.” —The Wall Street Journal From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.