LAB 4.0: features and prospectives

We are nowadays facing the fourth Industrial Revolution, the era of the so called “Industry 4.0”, that will bring to an industrial production completely automated and interconnected.

The keystone of the Industry 4.0 is the “Smart factory” featuring smart production, smart services and smart energy for improved environmental sustainability.The “Smart factory” is often represented as the aggregate of all its technologies: cyber-physical systems (CPS), the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), cloud computing and big data analytics, advanced manufacturing (that include automation and robotics to improve efficiency) and artificial intelligence. In the Smart Factory CPS check physical processes, create a virtual copy of them and make decentralized decisions. Over the Internet of Things, CPS interact and cooperate with other CPS and with humans in real time, and by cloud computing, both internal and cross-industrial services are made available for all the involved participants.

The fourth Industrial Revolution is meant to involve also the laboratories, that’s why we speak about LAB 4.0. The main drivers of LAB 4.0 are automation and robotics that allow to perform a growing number of research or routine tasks automatically and remotely. The automation of the sample prep increases the intelligence of laboratories and also their connectivity making easier the sharing of methods and results. Lab 4.0 focuses on increasing lab efficiency: it decreases the cost per analysis by lowering human labor and the consumption of consumables while improving overall equipment effectiveness and consequently production throughput.

HTA is already embracing all these philosophies of the lab 4.0 offering solutions that are customized, flexible and automated, specifically designed to increase the quality and the performance, reducing at the same time energy and resource consumption (for the best sustainability). HTA is also very attentive to the data security, introducing appropriate security measures especially in software development. Auto-diagnosis tools are also integrated to avoid errors, to get fastly reliable data and to take immediate and proper decisions.

Discover HTA solutions to automate your lab and sample prep. ​