Cyber-physical systems (CPS) and their networking to form the Internet of Things are emerging as effective concepts for managing the complexity of today's manufacturing requirements.

In combination with the possibility of designing new forms of human-technology interaction, CPS offer high potential. However, there is no out-of-the-box solution for the production system of the future. Rather, a kind of operating system is needed for the factory that allows individual and process-specific adaptation and realizes a high degree of adaptability of the elements and the factory system: Factory software. Factory software forms an essential building block of the Industrie4.0 toolkit. The realization of such an artifact includes conceptual tasks with questions of general architecture design, technology selection and integration, standardization and interoperability, as well as tasks of process design with modeling and analysis, and tasks of prototypical implementation and evaluation.