Promoting the development and application of "Industry 4.0" or "Smart Manufacturing" has become an important strategy for many countries to improve the competitiveness of manufacturing industry in recent years. Industrial 4.0 or smart manufacturing highly relies on intelligent machines, intelligent robots and intelligent production systems. Those intelligent equipment and production lines need to integrate key technologies and elements such as sensors, Internet of things, cloud computing, Big Data, artificial intelligence, digital design and simulation with them. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to introduce the development status of Germany, China and Taiwan in the field of industrial 4.0 and intelligent manufacturing applications. Development trend of application solutions and possible integration patterns of related technologies are introduced.