The publication series of the Standardization Roadmap Industrie 4.0 strategically and technically analyses both national and international standardization in the field of Industrie 4.0 and makes recommendations for action. Under my leadership, the "Standardization Roadmap Industrie 4.0" working group of the Standardization Council Industrie 4.0 developed the fourth version of the German Standardization Roadmap Industrie 4.0 in 2020. This progress report now provides an update on the implementation status of the recommendations for action made therein.

A total of 115 recommendations for action were assessed and evaluated with regard to their implementation with the involvement of experts from the relevant national standardization bodies. The fact that we can classify 62 of these recommendations for action as progress is a positive interim conclusion. With our outlook at the end of the progress report, we are preparing to locate and anchor projects such as the digital product passport, the digital type plate and other application examples in standardization for Industry 4.0 in the upcoming roadmap.

The assessments made here also serve as a guide and compass for the content of the fifth edition of the standardization roadmap, which will be published in 2023.

While the sustainability aspects of people and work have always been part of the standardization roadmap, in the next edition of the standardization roadmap we will focus more on the aspects of transparency along the entire life cycle of products and information on the raw materials used, which we already have to take into account today from a normative perspective.

I would like to thank all contributors. Without the tireless efforts of the volunteer experts, it would not be possible to produce both a progress report and a standardization roadmap.

We hope that all readers will enjoy reading this report. We hope that our publications will not only drive forward the standardization of Industry 4.0, but will continue to be seen as "door openers" for the standardization of digital manufacturing.

(Olga Meyer, Group Leader for Interoperability for Digital Production at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA and Chair of the Standardization Roadmap Industry 4.0 working group)

An overview of the publication series Standardization Roadmap Industry 4.0 is available here

An overview of the dates of the working group meetings can be found here