The National Centre for Industry 4.0  (CIIRC) was founded with the aim to contribute to the implementation of Industry 4.0 principles in the Czech Republic with emphasis on small and medium size enterprises and to spread awareness about the Industry 4.0 and Society 4.0 concepts. It serves as an important source of information about technological solutions and the impact of technological advancement on society and provides close cooperation between academic and industrial departments in areas of concern with aim to stimulate exchange of experience and best practices. It helps design, develop, connect and effectively operate a network of testbeds for Industry 4.0 located at CTU in Prague, Technical Universtiy in Brno and other institutions in the Czech Republic. It also supports know-how transfer into industry including innovative forms of start-ups and managed innovations.

In general terms, CIDIHub has the ambition to provide Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Systems’ competences together with a Cloud Computing infrastructure and the associated expertise based on existing technology and standards that allow software vendors to offer their regional customers (being it SME or bigger companies) new cloud services along and across the engineering and manufacturing chain – even vendor independent. CIDIHub provides a ‘single point of access’ to computational (simulation) and data management services on high-performance clusters (HPCs). For that purpose, the CIDIHub relies on a main regional Competence Center (ITER) from the very beginning, addressing needs in the CAD/CAM, CAE, Systems or PLM communities, for whom technological services are executed on the existing infrastructure.