Abstract
Sustainable production aims at creating products from processes that minimize environmental
impact, energy consumption and natural resources. Customers and markets are ever more leaning
towards digital, custom, and flexible solutions with lower environmental impact. Hence, Industry
4.0 (I4.0) solutions are increasingly including social and environmental sustainability aspects. We
focus on the realization of an infrastructure integrating industrially relevant application modules by
combining system reconfigurability and artificial intelligence, towards sustainable production. To
meet the final goal of sustainable production, we address four challenges considering flexibility and
sustainability in production in a holistic way: (1) developing infrastructural and methodological tools
to support companies to explore the potential of I4.0 towards sustainable production; (2) managing
the configurability and customization possibilities of products; (3) effectively handling the flexibility
provided by a production system with rapid reconfiguration capabilities; (4) integrating hardware and
software flexibility by using reconfigurable robotics and machine learning methods. By developing
and connecting different application modules, we obtain a physical demonstrator which represents on
the one hand an exemplary scenario of reconfigurable and flexible production system; on the other,
it enables new research activities and insights with a see, touch & feel approach for industrial and
research realities.