Industry 4.0 stems from the so-called fourth industrial revolution, which is leading to fully automated and interconnected industrial production. It is a production and business management model, which involves the use of machinery connected to the Internet (IoT - Internet of Things), information collection and analysis to activate "learning machine" processes, the possibility of more flexible management of the production cycle and improved human-machine interaction. 

New digital technologies will increasingly have a profound impact within four directions of development: 

The first concerns Data utilization, computing power and connectivity, and declines into big data, open data, Internet of Things, machine-to-machine and cloud computing for centralization of information and its storage. 

The second is that of the analytics: Once data is collected, value must be derived from it. Today, only 1% of the data collected is used by businesses, which could instead gain benefits from the "machine learning", that is, by machines that perfect their performance by "learning" from the data as they are collected and analyzed.

The third direction of development is theinteraction between man and machine, which involves the increasingly popular "touch" interfaces and augmented reality. Finally, there is the whole area that deals with the transition from digital to "real" and includes additive manufacturing, 3D printing, robotics, communications, machine-to-machine interactions, and new technologies for storing and using energy in a targeted way, streamlining costs and optimizing performance.