The socialization of production after the "age of steam", "electric era" and "information age" after the long-term development of the enterprise management practice for modern enterprises with the enterprise resource planning system (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM), supply chain management (SCM) and a series of production and management tools the method, finally people can further in the information era, the automated factory blueprint, to create smart factories.

Any of a large technological progress is to better meet the needs of the society. In the traditional factory before, consumer behavior change, short product life cycle, increase the risk of supply chain, customer service service complex are threatening the business. The new trend that the traditional manufacturing power have "smart factory" the development of the manufacturing industry showed great interest. In Germany, the development of intelligent plant directly called "industrial 4, BASF, BMW, BOSCH, Daimler, SAP, SIEMENS and other famous enterprises have invested in Germany's top R & D resources in the United States. Ge also invested a lot of manpower and material resources dedicated to the machine analysis, industry insight, automation and business forecast together, to build a new industrial commercial experiment of the Internet.
As the world's factory, China for manufacturing progress has maintained a vigilant attitude, many domestic outstanding enterprises have put forward the goal of building the smart factory, and even some enterprises have begun to try to build their own smart factory. But in terms of technology still has several big gap to these Chinese enterprises to go beyond.

The first is the information collection and analysis system for intelligent plant, its core is to achieve one of the requirements of information flow, material flow and management flow. One such ambition requires data collection and analysis system to support a strong Germany. One of the world's leading manufacturing enterprises has said that before the comprehensive construction smart factory must answer two questions: first, the product from design to production to customer service service, what data needs to be collected; two, how to design a data analysis system makes these data can effectively support the factory management and decision making. For Chinese enterprises, long-term in the low-end industrial chain link makes the lacking in information collection and analysis ability, many enterprises even China factory management notification are not complete, even the industry leader, in a few years ago just disappeared Out of the internal information island, built within the enterprise unified information management system. But from the comprehensive, effective management of information, the integrated use of information there is still a considerable gap, not to mention the smart factory for information used creatively put forward new requirements.

Secondly, the smart factory involves many aspects and technology, intelligent production in the process of production decision, supply chain optimization problems need to solve simulation system. With the promotion of the ISA95[8] standard, which had a great impact on the level of definition of enterprise control system integration - model of plant simulation model definition. Macro the simulation models such as the supply chain model of ERP layer, micro simulation models such as device production process model of.PCS layer, PCS layer and PCS layer, PCS layer model construction process for the analysis of production operation research is very important. Because the diversity of different levels of the model and modeling method, researchers need to for each object in the factory to establish an independent factory simulation model of a particular problem in the study of the process industry, so it will not only lead to the long development cycle, but also due to the construction of According to the model data management mode needs to build, will lead to the model and the data of targeted and abandoned, modeling and simulation process to manually configure the operation of a large number of work to bring a lot of inconvenience, resulting in model reuse rate is low and poor scalability.

The most important challenge is the ubiquitous fast Internet infrastructure, standard interface and network physical system. For large data applications platform, we need security and protection, so that people can trust this new networking technology and Industry Internet industry connection, there will be the development and use of more enterprises to join the smart factory.

A smart factory is a system engineering, but also the ability of a manufacturing enterprise need to gradually build. In different industries, different external market competition pattern, different development stages and different enterprise capabilities of enterprises, the construction of intelligent factory focus and starting point is not the same, although the Chinese manufacturing industry upgrade urgent, but should not blindly, according to their own situation, step by step is to intelligent plant road.