5G for closed-loop manufacturing

Manufacturing challenges are growing. Consumers want individual and high-quality products that are sustainable and environmentally friendly but still are produced with high speed. Companies must reduce the time-to-market, enhance flexibility, increase quality, and at the same time be energy efficient in manufacturing and fulfill high security levels: Challenges that can be faced with the support of digitalization, with strong and reliable infrastructures, that can harness the huge amount of data to use it for automation and control. Therefore one "(…) cornerstone for this digitalization journey is closed-loop manufacturing".
The vision for automation in Industry 4.0 requires closed-loop architectures to create feedback generated from the gathered data. Instantaneous dynamic reactions on process changes enhance product quality and process stability and lower costs concerning downtime and post processing. Therefore, a highly reliable and fast communication technology is needed for closed-loop architectures. 5G, the new mobile communication standard, promises high reliability and ultra-low latency to enable real-time process control. Theoretically, 5G should provide latencies down to 1ms and reliability up to 99,999%. But up to now, the 5G performance in real production scenarios has yet not been proven. Thus, this study will focus and investigate into 5G closed-loop architectures in real manufacturing environments.
In this report 5G closed-loop requirements and use cases are discussed, a representative 5G closed-loop architecture is elaborated and first results of the 5G performance in a closed-loop on the shopfloor are presented.