Industrial production is evolving towards small batch sizes and customized products. In two to three years, the hardware for 5G solutions will be available for so called cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) to meet new production requirements in significantly less time and with less expenses. In addition, applications such as (de)centralized wireless process control, sensor-based monitoring, or even automated guided vehicles (AGVs) will be much easier and more cost-effective to use. As a result, 5G will be the standard for industrial communication in the coming decade, making wiring infrastructure obsolete.
Currently, there are different challenges for the transition to flexible manufacturing and its associated applications. To make the CPPS reconfigurable and flexible, a high degree of interconnectivity of machine tools and other sub-systems is necessary. To date, a variety of heterogeneous communication technologies have been used for industrial communication. The required cabling drives up costs and is difficult to implement - especially in existing production systems. On the other hand, wireless communication solutions cannot meet the communication requirements for a large number of industrial use cases. Therefore, different communication technologies have to be implemented simultaneously. However, the multitude of wireless technologies can cause interference that disrupts the function of the machines. The effort to implement these technologies is also very high and thus expensive.
The 5G mobile communications standard offers solutions to these problems.
In this presentation, you learn how far the development of the 5G standard and hardware has progressed - what you can already implement today and what challenges currently exist (e.g., with regard to performance characteristics). Moreover, the potentials that can be realized in about two to three years will be highlighted. A first impression of this is given by the latest research results from Kaiserslautern with a three-axis CNC milling machine. Under the project management of Jan Mertes, its control was migrated to a server via a 5G and integrated into a digital twin. In addition, the digital twin monitors the status of the machine.
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