The notion of Industry 4.0 poses a new challenge for various industries, including the widely defined welding engineering. Presently, we are witnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution initiated in 2010. This revolution will significantly influence not only mass production of goods but our daily life as well. Many solutions related to the new industrial revolution will affect our reality in the years to come. To face these new challenges, welding engineering personnel will need to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams on a much closer basis to implement fusion welding, pressure welding and adhesive bonding technologies in industrial practice. Producers of welding equipment are already offering solutions constituting inherent elements of Industry 4.0. Only time will show the developmental direction of welding engineering. The study presents ideas behind individual industrial revolutions, the historical outline concerning the development of welding technologies, requirements which should be satisfied by personnel implementing and benefiting from Industry 4.0 as well as exemplary welding engineering-related solutions.

doi: 10.17729/ebis.2018.5/2