5G will be an important link in software-defined manufacturing

At its online Transformational Technology Summit last week, the analyst firm ABI Research looked at the digital transformation in the industry from the technology it considers one of the most important enablers: 5G. Private mobile networks will play a vital role in all aspects of software-defined manufacturing.

Software-defined manufacturing is a nice term that we ourselves had never encountered before. In the presentation 5G & The Future Of Industrial, Ryan Martin, research director at ABI Research, uses the term to indicate that software plays an increasingly important role in modern production processes.

We often talk about big data and connectivity, but it is indeed the software that works with that data, what it is ultimately all about. Managing production capacity, optimizing parameters, tracing quality - these are all aspects that are carried out by or with the help of software and that are starting to play an increasingly important role, among other things in achieving flexible and adaptive production systems.

The illustration for this article comes from the presentation of ABI Research and shows six domains in which the digitization of the industry can be noticed. One of the six is ​​the server room - an element that a few years ago wouldn't even be listed as part of a production plant.

In software-defined manufacturing, that server room is the beating heart of a factory - the place where it all happens. The machines are only there to implement the decisions of the software. That is a bit crude, of course, but it does reflect the concept of software-defined manufacturing.

Software-as-a-Service

In his presentation, Ryan Martin looks back on 2020, which was a remarkable year, not only because of the pandemic, but also because the manufacturing industry had already entered a crisis shortly before. In China, for example, which was recently considered the factory of the world, production in January 2020 was 40% lower than a year earlier.

Martin argues that there are a number of technologies that keep coming back when you look at companies that have performed well despite last year's crisis. The keepers, he calls it, and they are technologies such as simulation, digital twins, closed loop quality control and low-code development. It is in these types of technologies that we see the seeds of what will one day turn into software-defined manufacturing.

An important enabler in this is Software-as-a-Service - the concept whereby service providers offer knowledge and expertise contained in software packages that are constantly evolving. Thanks to this concept, industrial companies can subscribe to tools and applications that will run more and more aspects of a production process. The important enabler for Software-as-a-Service is the cloud.

Front-line workers

In the figure with six domains where digitization takes place according to ABI Research, 5G is the technology that is ideally suited to connect everything with each other. When we talk about digital twins, for example, we usually initially think of design drawings and simulations that form the digital copy of what is in the real world. But the concept of digital twin also assumes that those digital models are constantly fed with data from the real world. By definition, that data has to come from just about everywhere - an ideal job for 5G.

Also with predictive maintenance, which is defined in the presentation as planning maintenance based on data-driven decisions, data must be constantly collected from the field.

And there are a whole series of applications, such as asset tracking for example, that require more and better data connections.

At the same time, there are also what Martin calls the front-line workers - people in the field who play an important role in realizing everything that is conceived and decided in the digital world. They must access the data from the digital world in a simple and efficient way, for example via augmented reality. This also quickly demands high-performance wireless networks.

SWOT network technologies

Michael Larner, principal analyst at ABI Research, will make a SWOT analysis of the different network technologies that can be considered for putting this into practice, and then the importance that 5G will play in the industry immediately becomes clear.

The key elements in this are bandwidth and especially latency, which, if we are allowed to take a quick turn, comes down to the delay in data communication.

The networks that are compared with each other are private mobile phone networks (5G but it could also be with 4G), Wi-Fi, Ethernet (which means wired networks), Ultra-wide band (UWB) and Bluetooth.

Bluetooth may seem like an odd man out in this story, but it is a network protocol that is widely used in the industry. It is cheap, has a low energy consumption and thanks to a mesh topology, quite complex networks can be realized with it. However, as soon as there is any need for bandwidth and / or little room for latency, Bluetooth is not available.

An outsider that does well in terms of latency is UWB - a technology that is little known and therefore only loved to a limited extent, but which does deliver high-performance performance. One of the problems with UWB is that it is a technology that can be interpreted differently by different operators or suppliers. In the factory of the future, that is a story that has little chance, because the extensive standardization is one of the most important drivers for the advance of IT technology.

Private networks

And so we come to the classics: Ethernet, Wi-Fi and soon also 5G. Ethernet over a wired network is of course extremely efficient in terms of bandwidth and latency. The disadvantage is the cabling, which is not only a cost but also has its limitations in terms of flexibility, especially when mobile robots and workstations come into play.

Wi-Fi also performs well in terms of bandwidth, but implementations often face problems. With mobile robots and AGVs, handovers between access points are regularly seen as the cause of malfunctions and downtime. And although in theory it shouldn't, many projects also struggle with RF interferences and blind spots in access point coverage caused by all kinds of fixed and moving installations in a factory.

And so the private mobile phone networks remain as the most suitable solution for realizing high-performance and flexible networks. The term private refers to the fact that a company can have its own cell tower (s) to create a network that works like the public 5G network but is completely separate from it. The 5G concept will also make it possible to rent a private network via a telecom provider that uses the public infrastructure but is separated in a virtual way.

Hyper scalers

In a recent survey, ABI Research asked industrial companies about their interest in 4G / 5G for the development of private wireless networks and what would prevent them from taking the step - a step that can actually already be taken thanks to an intermediate step via 4G.

In the responses, 57% pointed to the high cost as the main hurdle. 50% say they don't know enough about the technology. That ignorance translates into further security concerns and the difficulty in defining business cases, which has also been cited as a hurdle.

It is of the utmost importance for suppliers to take this into account, according to ABI Research. They will have to invest heavily in education and information to address any concerns about 5G and to convince the industry of the opportunities that present themselves.

For the suppliers, Michael Larner had an additional - in our opinion telling - advice, namely that they should pay sufficient attention to what Amazon and Microsoft are all doing in the world of software-defined manufacturing. These so-called hyper scalers have discovered the industry as an important growth area and are working with AWS and Azure to develop all kinds of solutions that focus on the cloud, but also descend further and further into the networks and applications in the factory. The advice for providers of 5G connected solutions is that they should embrace these mastodons and develop solutions that are compatible with them in order not to be bulldozed. Clear proof that software-defined manufacturing can no longer be stopped.

© Productivity.be, 26/03/2021, Picture: ABI Research


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