Concept for structuring and derivation of technology fields in the context of Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS)

First cyber-physical-production systems (CPPS) are already in use in factories and their number will increase significantly in the next years. Thereby they are heralding the fourth industrial revolution, denominated »Industrie 4.0« in Germany. The implementation of this proclaimed industrial revolution will come along with crucial technological changes and business model innovations, including enormous opportunities for companies but also serious risks, if critical or disruptive technological changes are not identified early enough and corresponding reactions are not initiated. Thus an efficient and effective technology forecasting is crucial for companies to benefit from »Industrie 4.0«. But companies’ business intelligence departments are facing the major difficulty to identify the relevant technological inventions in a new and so far unstructured technological environment. Therefore this paper presents a concept for the identification and structuring of application technologies and the demand-oriented derivation of structured search fields for the technology forecasting process in the context of CPPS. The concept was developed within the research project »Industrie 4.0 - International Benchmark, Future scenarios and recommendations for production research (INBENZHAP)«, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)