Converging Telco-Grade Solutions 5G and beyond to Support Production in Industry 4.0

The Industry 4.0 initiative has been showing the way for industrial production to optimize operations based on collecting, processing, and sharing data. There are new requirements on the production floor: flexible but ultra-reliable, low latency wireless communications through interoperable systems can share data. Further challenges of data sharing and storage arise when diverse systems come into play at the Manufacturing Operations Management and Business Planning & Logistics levels. The emerging complex cyber-physical systems of systems need to be engineered with care. Regarding industrial requirements, the telecommunication industry has many similarities to production—including ultra-reliability, high complexity, and having humans “in-the-loop”. The current paper aims to provide an overview of converging telco-grade solutions that can be successfully applied in the wide sense of industrial production. These toolsets range from model-driven engineering through system interoperability frameworks, 5G- and 6G-supported manufacturing, and the telco-cloud to speech recognition in noisy environments.