New alliance, dubbed 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation” (5G-ACIA), aims to promote adoption of 5G in industrial production
A number of representatives of the automation and manufacturing industries as well as leading organizations from the ICT industry have established the “5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation (5G-ACIA), to promote the adoption of 5G in industrial production.
Some of the 26 initial founders of this new alliance includes Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Nokia, Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Siemens, Mitsubishi, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Endress+Hauser, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Trumpf Hirschmann Automation & Control, Infineon, the Institute for Industrial Information Technology (inIT), and the Institute for Automation and Communication (ifak).
5G-ACIA is contributing to the standardization and regulation of 5G technologies. At the same time, the alliance is working to identify and analyze possible use cases and the associated requirements from the perspective of the industrial domain.
In a recent white paper, 5G-ACIA highlighted that wireless communication — and in particular, 5G — may support achievement of the fundamental goals of Industry 4.0; namely, to improve the flexibility, versatility and productivity of future smart factories.
“5G supports communication with unprecedented reliability and very low latencies, and also massive IoT connectivity. This paves the way for numerous new use cases and applications in many different vertical domains, including the automotive, healthcare, agriculture, energy and manufacturing sectors. In manufacturing in particular, 5G may have a disruptive impact as related building blocks, such as wireless connectivity, edge computing or network slicing, find their way into future smart factories,” the white paper states.
According to the chairman of 5G-ACIA, Andreas Müller, the alliance brings together important players in the fields of Internet of Things and smart factories for the first time and will make it possible to align 5G with the needs of industries worldwide.
“5G will become the central nervous system of the Factory of the Future and will have a disruptive impact on industrial production,” Müller said. “For the first time, the 5G-ACIA brings together all the major players worldwide. This enables us to work in a concerted and targeted manner to ensure that the interests of the industry are taken into account accordingly.”
“5G will help evolve many industries and the development of the technology supports the need for multi-purpose solutions driven by the variety of use cases. We need to create the ecosystems that are required for early adoption, and new partnerships and alliances, such as 5G-ACIA, are essential to this process,” said Mats Norin, Program Manager 5G for Industries, at Ericsson.
