As digital transformation spreads, domestic small and medium-sized manufacturing companies are also looking for opportunities to build smart factories, but they are having difficulties finding the optimal solutions and suppliers for their factories and designing smart factories.

To this end, the government and private companies are coming up with various ways to support small and medium-sized manufacturing companies in building smart factories.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups is promoting the 'Metaverse Factory (Meta Factory) Construction Support Project' to help manufacturing SMEs achieve process optimization using the metaverse. The business briefing session will be held on February 7 at Seoul Square (near Seoul Station), and business applications can be submitted from February 17 (Friday) to March 6 (Monday) through the Intelligent Factory Business Management System.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups plans to support the HW/SW costs for building meta factories by creating a consortium between introducing companies (companies with manufacturing plants) and supplying companies using technologies such as CPS and XR. The construction level of the meta factory aims to be at least 'Stage 3' or higher in the step-by-step digital twin classification.

Through this, he said, “It is expected that small and medium-sized enterprises will be able to utilize it in areas such as improving and optimizing manufacturing processes, predictive maintenance of equipment, transferring know-how from highly skilled workers, enhancing safety in hazardous processes, and remotely controlling clean rooms.”

The spread of smart factories is part of an effort to go beyond achieving production optimization and solve urban problems through ICT.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport will hold a contest for the '23 Smart City Development and Expansion Industry' from the 6th to help the government, citizens, businesses and local governments solve urban problems. A total of 14 local governments will be selected on the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport website, and support will be provided at a scale of 104 billion won.

In 2023, we will introduce a solution expansion project that supports excellent solutions as a package, a hub project that demonstrates comprehensive solutions across the city to create a smart city hub, and a new small-scale smart city project to create a leading city to respond to environmental changes such as the climate crisis and regional extinction.

The solution diffusion project is a project to evenly distribute verified smart solutions such as smart crosswalks nationwide, and 2 billion won in national funds will be provided to 8 business sites for one year. The hub smart city mainly focuses on building smart infrastructure that supports regional specialization and advanced industries, and disseminating innovative urban services. To this end, deregulation is supported through the smart city regulatory sandbox, and 20 billion won in national funds will be provided to business sites for three years.

The Small and Medium Smart City project is a project to create a leading city that focuses on specialized solutions to enhance the competitiveness of small and medium-sized cities in order to secure their ability to respond to environmental changes. A national budget of 12 billion won will be provided to cities with a population of less than 1 million.