Industry and the 5G

 

Industry in Europe, including Portugal, is quite relevant. It accounts for over 20% of the EU economy, directly employs around 35 million people and contributes to over 80% of exports, making it crucial to future progress and prosperity.

Although European industry still has a competitive advantage on many high value-added products and services, it is under a significant transformation towards a greener and more digital industry to ensure its competitiveness.

It is undeniable that digital technologies can transform the face of the Industry and the way value is created, delivered and captured. Digitalisation fosters the emergence of new business models, enables Industry to be more efficient, provides workers with new skills and supports the decarbonisation of the economy, by providing a source of clean technological solutions and actively contributing to the European Green Pact.

Technologies around 5G are essential to ensure the competitiveness of tomorrow’s industry. They are essential because they enable the implementation of adaptive and strategies – the natural ambition of smart businesses.

The industry is in the midst of a historic moment of development. The challenge is to create companies with learning capabilities, agile and able to continuously adapting to changing conditions. The faster an organization adapts to an event that causes a change in its operating environment, the greater the benefits of adaptation. The aim is therefore, to drastically reduce the time between the occurrence of an event and the implementation of an appropriate response. This means that, for example, unexpected changes in the 'factory floor', captured, propagated and understood in due time , can be taken into account during the manufacturing process of a product, because the company guarantees the agility to adapt to the new situation.

Therefore, with the rise of 5G, batteries are pointed towards the development and implementation of so-called smart factories – data-centric, with reduced latency, unpredictability, and with high levels of interoperability. This evolution towards a smart industry implies embracing four key maturity stages, namely:

I. Visibility – What is happening?

II. II. Transparency – Why is it happening? To understand why something is happening and to use this understanding to produce knowledge through root cause analysis. In order to identify and interpret interactions, the captured data must be analysed through the application of engineering knowledge.

III. Predictability – What will happen? Once companies are able to anticipate future events, they must also be prepared to take the necessary steps to minimise the potential negative impacts of these events.

IV. Adaptability – autonomous and intelligent responsiveness; the result of the combination of advanced connectivity, processing power, and artificial intelligence located in the devices that use and generate data.

The smart industry maturity stages therefore depend on factors related to communication networks and their applications. The mobility of people and objects without communication restrictions is the first of these factors, and will enhance the emergence of new mobile equipment including intelligent forklifts or intelligent robots, sensors anywhere, tracking of objects and people, modular production lines, or new forms of human-machine interactions that, for example, allow an operator to wear augmented reality glasses.

Mobile computing and communications brought to every object and person, whether on the factory floor or in industrial processes and chains, on the other hand, potentiates a number of new applications that will combine local information with information available in the cloud. The ideal communications network, characterised by instantaneous transfer of large amounts of data anywhere and anytime, allows us to think of applications that include the Internet of the senses with the possibility of transferring smells and sensations, holographic communications, the real-digital continuum with the human entering the “computer game” or their real environment being reconfigured, humanoid robots communicating with each other or with people.

Unlike mobile communications from previous generations, 5G will allow us to create multiple wireless networks, coexisting in time and space, each dedicated to the transporting of data from applications with specific characteristics. This ability to adapt and reconfigure 5G allows us to create wireless networks offering 1 Gbit/s to a terminal, or information transfer delays of less than 10 ms, or the possibility of obtaining information from equipment located in areas with difficult radio access.

5G also differs from other wireless communication technologies, such as Wi-Fi, in the reliability associated with it. Unlike Wi-Fi, which transmits on open -access radio channels and is therefore subject to interference, 5G works on exclusive-access radio channels – without interference. On the other hand, 5G does not have the low transmission power limits of Wi-Fi that require the installation of a large number of radio access points, so the 5G radio infrastructure of a factory is simplified.

A relevant aspect for the industry is the use of 5G private networks. Countries such as Germany or France allow a company to broadcast radio exclusively within its premises, without interference from third parties, allowing it to create its private 5G network. Various models of private networks can be adopted, some of which would be in partnership with telecom operators. This versatility of 5G is very relevant because it will allow each company to move forward in defining using 5G communications networks at its own pace and considering its communications needs.

Industry and 5G will be inseparable partners in the times ahead.