BT and a cohort of technical partners are demonstrating the future of network service design for Industry 4.0, using the power of 5G.The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) presents huge opportunities for traditional sectors such as manufacturing. Through connecting machines and using automation and data, manufacturers can do things faster and cheaper, and drive up productivity.
According to the Capgemini Research Institute,
76% of manufacturers either have a digital factory initiative that is ongoing or are working towards formulating one.
In turn, this creates a new market for telcos to provide specialized services to support the required connectivity for this critical automation. Manufacturing is set to represent one of the biggest areas of 5G revenue and ROI potential for operators.
Estimates suggest the sector could be worth up to $113 billion by 2026. Edge computing will also be key in industry 4.0 applications for data security, minimized processing requirements, low latency and speed.
A TM Forum proof-of-concept Catalyst project is addressing some of the technical challenges which must be overcome to help both manufacturers and the communications industry seize this new opportunity.
That’s why the Catalyst is called
Wirtschaftswunde: Leveraging 5G for Industry 4.0 – Wirtschaftswunde translates as ‘economic miracle’. It originated as a term to describe the rapid reconstruction and development of the economies of West Germany and Austria after the Second World War.
The challenge
Communications service providers (CSPs) such as BT see the size of the opportunity. That’s why BT is the Champion of the Catalyst, setting and guiding the business challenge. Champions work alongside participants – in this case, Infosys, Nokia and TTG – who each provide a piece of the solution.
Industry 4.0 applications will require a dynamic hybrid physical and virtual network (including network slices) with a large number of controllers which will need to communicate with each other. Network management is complex and slicing makes it even more challenging. Network slicing allows a physical network to be divided into multiple virtual networks, enabling operators to provision the right ‘slice’ depending on the requirements of the use case – this will be crucial for industry 4.0 applications.
Making all this work requires efficient management of network resources, taking into account various requirements, licence provisions and service level agreements (SLAs), as well as being able to scale resources up and down as required on demand.
Phase one of this Catalyst, titled
Agile OSS Network, focused on speeding up network kit onboarding. The latest phase turns its attention to network service design for Industry 4.0, using 5G network slices over physical network functions (PNFs) and virtual network functions (VNFs). It uses industry standards like OASIS TOSCA, IETF YANG, TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) and Open APIs.
At
Digital Transformation Asia in Kuala Lumpur (November 12-14), the team will demonstrate how the network can be managed to support industry 4.0 applications. They will showcase a blueprint for closed-loop automation using real-time network monitoring and the provision of additional 5G network slices via dynamic orchestration. The whole system will be fully automated and ‘zero-touch’.
One example will show how a manufacturing customer can use a 5G slice to connect surveillance cameras to an image analytics function for a safety use case.
Who does what?
As the Catalyst champion, BT has taken up the challenge to figure out how its operational support system (OSS) can seamlessly manage PNFs, VNFs, wired and wireless networks to support industry 4.0 use cases.
BT Technology and Infosys will showcase a fulfilment-model-driven next-generation OSS using NOSQL Graph DB to configure and manage 5G slices. Graph DB stores service and network inventory. TTGI brings its assurance solution to monitor 5G slices and uses BT’s NG OSS Open APIs to implement closed-loop automation. Nokia provides its 5G mobility network and intent-based network management capability to manage 5G slices.
The team is using TM Forum’s Information Framework as the data model. The Service Ordering Management API is used for OSS-BSS integration. The team will contribute their findings back to the TM Forum community to extend and develop these assets for wider benefit.
