In this essay, we develop a decision model for the economic impact of Industry 4.0 technologies/IIoT devices on established business processes by testing two hypotheses concerning a decision model based on production functions. New methods to aid in the design and modelling of production systems that are able to rapidly reconfigure and that are self-adaptive in response to disruption (both by humans and for automated systems) are required (Sanderson, Chaplin, - Ratchev, 2019).Mass customization, shorter product lifecycles, smaller production batches and higher production variability lead to the requirement for manufacturing systems to be rapidly reconfigurable and self-adaptive in response to disruption, We propose to recover and apply available and established techniques to evaluate and assess the rationale of technologies before they are implemented to improve the decision process. We consider the investment into IIoT devices from a microeconomic perspective as a long-run problem for companies and therefore consider those problems to be reviewed with adequate methodologies to build a consistent decision model. Investing into a factor (such as an IIoT device) is only economically reasonable as long as this factor produces a benefit, otherwise the investment infringes upon economic feasibility (Fandel 2005).

The transition from the second industrial revolution (electrification) to the third industrial revolution (automation) was accompanied by a transformation of economy into a science with a powerful mathematic foundation. The methods developed do have some inaccuracies, such as the assumption that logical agents drive the market, an assumption that was realized to be a failure in the models not long ago. The models were developed in a transition phase, while the industrial revolution took place. The models are currently not mature enough to support companies in their investment strategies for the fourth industrial revolution, the age of digitalization and interconnectedness. The purpose of this study is to create a theoretical model for the process of creating a business case for the investment in technologies within the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).